The KGB taught Jack Barsky to vanish. His daughter taught him to stay.

Lex Fridman starts with the basic question: what is the KGB? Barsky unpacks the Russian — Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee of State Security — and lingers on the last word. *Opasnost* is a threat; *bez* means without. The most infamous intelligence service of the Cold War translates, on the face of it, to security without threat. It was founded in 1954, after Stalin's death, and disbanded with the Soviet Union. The successors are the SVR, roughly a CIA analogue and relatively weak, and the FSB, which Barsky says has taken on much of the espionage and active-measures work and is bigger and stronger.

The most capable Russian service, he argues, is the one almost nobody can describe: the GRU, military intelligence. He had no idea it existed while he was in the KGB. Nobody mentioned it. The same thing happened years later when the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency invited him to speak; he had not known the DIA existed either. Fridman puts the design choice on the table. If you want an intelligence agency, do you want the world to know your name, so you can recruit the ambitious, or do you want to be so dark that no one is sure you are there?

The instability is older than the three-letter brand. Between 1923 and 1953, Barsky says, the service went through eight heads; six were executed when they were replaced. The Soviet Union, in his telling, was the only dictatorship that did not rest its power on the military. It rested it on the intelligence apparatus, and that apparatus was unstable — bricks that could not hold the load, or, as Fridman puts it, sand. Stalin's paranoia ran downhill. If the top does not trust you, you worry about peers snitching. Barsky thinks Russia today has a similar climate, and in that climate the truth never gets to the top.

He lived inside a milder version of the same logic. The KGB, he says, was excellent at compartmentalization, a habit inherited from underground communist cells of three or four people. He believes his Moscow handler never met him. The technicians who taught Morse and secret writing were engineers doing a job; the officers who prepared him for America were elegant, not the gun-carrying stereotype. He learned about the “muscle” only after he retired and started reading. Trust still sat at the center: they would not send him if they did not trust him, and he would not go if he did not trust them. He eventually broke that trust, and they had always known the assignment itself — ten to twelve years of becoming American — made defection a live risk.

What unified the KGB, Barsky says, was genuine belief. This was not a shop of cynics winking at their parents' slogans. After the war the Soviet Union looked, on a schoolroom map, as if it were winning the Third World: red for communism, blue for capitalism, green for the unaligned, and the green slowly turning pink — Angola, Vietnam. The myth was that they would overtake the United States not only militarily but in industrial production. He calls that a stupid pipe dream now. At the time it was the air he breathed.

Fridman presses on the moral surface of the idea: respect for workers, a world in which the lower classes are no longer stolen from. Barsky agrees that it sounds good, and that when you are young you take it in emotionally. Then someone has to organize the wonderful new order. Lenin predicted the state would wither; Barsky asks how that is supposed to work without becoming anarchy. Large numbers of people get a hierarchy. The people who reach the top are the ones who want to, who believe they know better. Every such hierarchy he looks at has gone bad. He is willing to call Fidel Castro an honest revolutionary. Cuba is what that honesty became.

The terror, he reminds Fridman, did not start with Stalin. After the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin told Dzerzhinsky to build the Cheka and run what he called the Red Terror: no rule of law, people pulled from apartments and shot. Barsky's own belief had a more local root. In Germany, just before Hitler took over, the communists were the force that fought the Nazis in the streets; the Nazis hunted them, killed them, put them in camps. East German juniors in the top tenth of students — the next ruling elite — were required to visit a concentration camp. Piles of corpses, lampshades of tattooed skin, a shrunken head the size of a fist. The girls cried. The communists, in that lesson, were the Nazi-fighters, the good guys. In hindsight he knows Stalin and Mao reverse the picture. They did not know that then.

West Germany handed the East a propaganda gift by putting ex-Nazis in government, the most famous being Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's eastern-front intelligence chief, later co-opted by the CIA and made head of the BND. Barsky was born four years and about ten days after Germany's unconditional surrender, into the southeastern corner of what became the German Democratic Republic a few months later. Genetically he is only half German; the rest is Czech and Polish. He could walk to the Neisse, the Polish border. The Marshall Plan rebuilt the West; the Soviets hauled away what they had not already destroyed. East Germany stayed behind, and a decorated student in Jena could still feel chosen.

Asked for a fond childhood memory, Barsky does not reach for a laboratory. He reaches for his first kiss. He was sixteen, head over heels, and in those days he thought of girls as magical beings, incapable of evil, to be adored. One of them loved him back; she came after him. That is when he started studying. Until then an A-minus had been enough. Every A after that he dedicated to her, sometimes out loud, because he knew he was going to take care of her. The next day he walked around school with a grin. The passion, he says only in hindsight, was an early sign that love would steer his life.

They were an item for two years. He lost his virginity; she was not a virgin. The competitor was older, already in medical school, going to be a doctor. Barsky's verdict is that the man was not better — he was just more experienced — and that presence wins. In their senior year they were together again and he was dreaming of a future. They had not done the geography. She went to college in Berlin, he went to Jena, and the distance was too far for a weekend on slow public transport. Nobody had cars. A few letters, then a goodbye letter. He can still feel it.

Fridman says the pain of loss is still part of love. Barsky agrees it is well put, and then describes the moment: a mail slot in the front door, the letter he had been expecting, upstairs to the bedroom, and the life going out of him. He had no emotional relationship with his parents. He was alone with it. If he had had a suicidal tendency, he says, he might have killed himself. What he did instead was throw himself into chemistry and outwork everyone. For the first two years of college he did not look at the pretty girls or the dances. Companionship, eventually. Love — no more. That hurts.

The career he thought he wanted was a tenured professorship in Jena, a town of about 100,000 with, he guesses, maybe thirty such chairs — ruling elite, prestige, a feeling of superiority. In his third year he won the Karl Marx scholarship, limited to a hundred concurrent recipients in the whole country. Teachers and classmates fed the ego. There was no mentor to put things in perspective; his father was a non-entity. In his fifth year he fathered a child out of wedlock. The East German party was moralistic about that sort of thing. Nobody mentioned a word. That, he says, is how an ego gets nurtured — and it is close to the profile the KGB wanted: mid-twenties, not fully formed, mature enough to test.

The knock came on a Saturday, at his dorm room. He knew it was a stranger because students knocked and walked in; this one waited. A man with fluent German introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, the optics giant, and asked about plans after graduation. Barsky knew at once that the cover was wrong. There was no recruitment in that system: the top tenth stayed for a doctorate, the rest were assigned. He assumed Stasi. He was wrong about the employer, not about the strangeness. When the man reversed himself — not Carl Zeiss, the government — and asked whether Barsky could imagine working for the government, the answer was careful: yes, but not as a chemist. He had answered a question that had not been asked.

Lunch was at Jena's best restaurant, rump steak with butter and french fries. A second man was at the table: Herman, working with “our Soviet comrades.” The German vanished. For about a year and a half Herman, a Russian with a German accent, played older brother — meetings in a car, then in a conspiratorial flat where a single party member left tea and cookies. He handed over forbidden West German magazines. Barsky began to feel special, above the law of both Germanies. Later they would tell him to watch West German television, not explicitly banned and still enough to get you in trouble. James Bond was not a joke he needed help making.

The tasks looked like homework and were character tests. Write up a hitchhiking trip to Bulgaria — could he observe and report? Profile fellow students — could he characterize people? That skill would later be his American job as a spotter. Then the unpleasant work: an address, a name, ring the doorbell, invent a story, extract something about a relative in the West. He hated it. He was shy, and he was unused to lying. He did it well anyway, beard and all, posing as a sociology student with a survey until the woman volunteered what he wanted. Over time the discomfort faded and he rationalized: there is only one way, and you are serving a good cause. Lying, he discovered, can be trained.

After a year and a half, Herman sent him to Berlin for a three-week “practice trip.” It was his first real conspiratorial meeting: an address, a time, a code phrase, an agent called Boris — all cover names. The recognition protocol he later used in the field was almost comic. Approach someone who might be the contact, ask “Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Greene,” and hope to hear “Yes, you must be David.” A stranger will look at you as if you are lost. A low-probability answer is a safe sieve.

They smuggled him into West Berlin on a real East German passport, stamped for the West, through a stretch of border guarded only by Soviet troops. He got on the subway and appeared in the western city. No American, British, or French checkpoint knew he had entered. The first trip was atmospheric: walk around, smell the air, drink a beer, eat a sausage, come back. The second was another doorbell job, and it went well. Only later did he understand why they sent him twice. The first time he felt highly uncomfortable, as if the enemy could read KGB on his forehead, even though the police wore unremarkable light blue. He was scared. He overcame it.

In Berlin he ran into a high-school classmate who confided that the Stasi had recruited him for the same kind of work. That classmate also got a practice trip to the West. He peed his pants, came back, and said he could not do it. The career was over. He had an engineering degree; Barsky believes he spent the rest of his life trading in model railroads. Fail the fear test and you pay for it. Barsky did not know that at the time. He simply did not fail.

The offer came in a huge office, a little unimpressive man behind a huge desk, a bust of Dzerzhinsky, Lenin on the wall. When the man opened his mouth, Barsky says, the psychological energy was enormous. Five minutes of Russian propaganda, then the spring: so, are you in or not? Barsky had not made up his mind. He stallied with things he still needed to learn, including, absurdly, how to drive a car and type. The man was annoyed. They would train him. What they needed were decisive people. Noon tomorrow, tell Boris. That night he did not sleep. On one side: assistant professor, Jena as hometown, the basketball team he loved. On the other: adventure, the worldwide victory of communism, the feeling of being special. He did not have the two anchors that might have held him — an emotional tie to his mother, a steady girlfriend. His friend Günther, approached by the Stasi, said no because he was in love. Barsky went with his gut. He was in.

The cover was the East German foreign service: he would become a diplomat, on paper. He handed his party document to the university secretary, who said they probably would not hear much about him, but they knew he was going to do something important. Then a train to Berlin and a new handler, Nikolai. Barsky had spent six years in a Jena dorm, even as a university employee — bed, chair, table, toilet down the hall — and assumed the KGB in Berlin meant a nice apartment. Nikolai, in the car, gave him his first task: find yourself a place to live.

Housing in East Germany was a government monopoly with waiting lists measured in years. Couples he knew had been told they might get an apartment in five years and had postponed having a child. The assignment was close to impossible. He did not show it on his face. He took the city train to the last stop, a town called Erkner, wandered, and knocked on doors asking if anyone knew of a place. After a couple of hours someone pointed him to a woman who happened to have an outbuilding: concrete, a bed, a chair, cold running water, a cold stove, toilet across the yard. He told Nikolai he had found something. He did not complain.

For six months he commuted in for operational training, read in libraries, and joined a basketball team so he could shower twice a week. Then Nikolai handed him a key. The studio had a kitchen with cold water and a toilet one flight down — a big upgrade — plus a thousand marks for furniture and, soon, a television for West German programs. Barsky had been on probation without knowing it. The line he has written about, and repeats here, is that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems; they prefer solutions. With Nikolai he took it all in: no arguments, no “I know this better.” The technical instructors taught things that made sense. Some of Nikolai's generalities were shaky. He did not probe.

Berlin training lasted about two years. On the technical side he learned Morse, shortwave reception, and a manual encryption algorithm that spat out digits. He eventually noticed a pattern: in a hundred-digit key, the digits zero through nine appeared equally often. He was told such hand ciphers were good for about three hundred uses before they could be broken. It was neither efficient nor convenient; it took a long time, and you could not make an error, so you did the work twice. Easier, if you were willing to carry spy gear, was a one-time pad developed with iodine — unbreakable unless reused. In the United States he carried almost nothing incriminating except a writing pad whose first ten pages or so were impregnated for secret writing. It looked like something from a store. You would have to know what you were looking for.

Counter-surveillance was taught as trickery plus a surveillance detection route: wander a city for three hours and decide whether you are being followed. The route has to be planned. His favorite Moscow spot was a quiet road that went downhill and curved, with a telephone booth at the bottom. Opening the door and picking up the phone makes you look back; the motion is natural, not a giveaway, and you can see who came down the hill. Watchers have a structural disadvantage. They cannot lose sight of the target, so someone always has to come close. See the same face twice and you know. Clothes can change; faces, in that era, could not. He beat the training teams every time. In the United States he was told to run an SDR once a month, or before mailing a secret letter — a routine, not a daily paranoia.

They also taught photography and microdots, a photograph shrunk with a reversed microscope to the size of a pinhead and hidable under a stamp. He knew how. They never asked him to use it. The first book they gave him was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The second was the West German constitution, then magazines, and West German television, which he “embraced with a vengeance” because it was better, including the German *Sesame Street* over breakfast. He was pushed to expand his cultural education — museums, theater, opera, books — and to file a monthly report. There was no curriculum, no checklist. It was all ad hoc, and it relied on his initiative, which was itself an evaluation. The point of the opera, he says, was practical. After about two years in the United States he could move through a diplomatic soiree in Washington without making a bad impression. The targets worth having lived in those rooms, not among the worker bees.

They required another language and let him choose. English was a no-brainer: he had been a straight-A student without studying. He started from scratch with a tutor, then conversation, and worked like a maniac. The inspiration, he says, was Lenin, who in exile had learned a hundred new German words a day. Barsky read newspapers, wrote every unknown word on an index card, German on one side and English on the other, and actually counted to a hundred. He built five piles. Pile one was new; pile five had been answered right four times; one more right answer sent a card to the archive, a wrong answer sent it down a rank, and now and then he threw archived cards back to pile one. Fridman recognizes spaced repetition. Barsky later wrote a program to do the same thing on his first PC, around 1984.

The method gave him a vocabulary significantly above the American average, because he did not discriminate. The side effect was that English is rich in synonyms and he often reached for the less idiomatic one. People found he had an interesting way of talking. He also did a half-hour phonetics tape every night, word by word, mostly vowels — *hot* versus *hut*, the kind of contrast German speakers miss. A visitor from Moscow heard him read a book without a dictionary, sent a tape recorder, and two weeks later put him on a plane, his first. Two women tested him: a young Russian who said she was a professor at Lomonosov, obviously KGB, and a middle-aged American-born tutor. It was close. The American thought he could get near native; the Russian was doubtful. Wishful thinking prevailed. Within weeks he moved to Moscow for two years.

The American-born woman became his tutor twice a week. He listened to the BBC, read, drilled phonetics, learned to drive, and ran surveillance-detection routes. They even taught him to read ship silhouettes; in 1982, under an Andropov campaign that had every Western-based illegal watching for signs of war, his object would be Earle Weapons Station in New Jersey, code name “early.” Moscow itself left other marks. The standard of living was well below East Germany: canned fish and mineral water you could count on, everything else a maybe, lines you joined without asking what they were for, drunken men in the streets, handsome high-rises with wrecked courtyards. Fresh bread was reliable. Stolichnaya was four rubles if you knew the hole in the wall. The visit to Lenin's mausoleum, his hero under glass, was a big nothing. What the two years really taught him was how to be alone. No friends, no women, only trainers. That loneliness prepared him for his first years in the United States, when he could not socialize without giving himself away. They had not taught him how to be an American. They could not.

He was born Albrecht Dittrich, named by his mother after Albrecht Dürer, a name he hated. In Moscow the cover was Dieter. In the United States he became Jack Barsky. In between there were other passport names; one he remembers is William Dyson, on the Canadian document he used to enter the country. The first year in America he could not even work until he had a Social Security card and a driver's license. Then he was a bike messenger, which suited a man who needed to listen more than he spoke. The people on that job were not very curious about him.

Before the United States came a three-month practice trip to Canada, which Barsky now files under a rule for happiness: the ability to make fun of the worst situations. One task was to obtain a birth certificate in the name of Henry Van Randall, born somewhere in California. He wrote from a small hotel whose return address did not look like a hotel, waited three weeks, then four, then yelled from a payphone that they had his money. The envelope arrived. Inside was a copy of a birth certificate stamped, in large red letters, deceased. A dead man had just requested his own papers. He had the presence of mind to leave town. He should have left the country. The RCMP, the FBI later told him, was always a step behind. His SDR found nothing, so he kept going. They did not catch him on the way out, even though the airline saw the passport and the hotel had the name. It was Swissair. Part of life, he says, is luck. The trip still did its job: it delivered the culture shock he would need so America would not blow him out of the water.

The second near-ending was Chicago. On a flight from Mexico City to Toronto they made him deplane there, over-engineering that still makes no sense to him. It was already dark. He picked a hotel from the yellow pages, gave the address to a cabbie who looked at him oddly, and rode south as the neighborhoods got less inviting. The desk sat behind plexiglass. He knew America had a lot of crime; maybe every hotel was like that. He drank half a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to knock himself out, woke with a giant headache, took aspirin, went looking for food, and discovered he was in the middle of the South Side, a place he had not known existed. He decided the next hotel would be under Jack Barsky. Destroying William Dyson's passport was a skill nobody had taught him. He tried to burn it; it was flame-retardant and threw up a cloud of smoke under a detector. He threw it in the toilet, cut it up, and flushed. He was carrying six thousand dollars in cash. If someone stole the passport or the money, there was no Plan B. There were no Soviets in Chicago.

He should not have gone to Chicago, he says. They could have sent him into San Francisco or Washington, where Soviets actually lived. His end goal was New York. If he had gone back and kept working for the KGB, he thinks he would have been a really dangerous agent, because he could have told them how to do it right. Preparing him to be an American was almost total incompetence. None of the men training him had lived as illegals. In New York they lived in a compound in northern Manhattan with their families and spent most of their time with their own people. They did not know what they did not know. He thinks the CIA's knowledge of Russian culture was just as bad, and that the ignorance on both sides helped push the 1980s toward nuclear scare. Deep integration would have been better intelligence. It would also have been dangerous, because the illegal starts to question the home narrative, and the people at the top always have the option of ignoring what comes back.

On the assassinations attributed to Vladimir Putin — Alexander Litvinenko, and the longer Soviet-Russian list that includes Georgi Markov — Barsky reaches for plausible deniability. He does not think the head of state says “do that.” He muses that it would be nice if something happened, and somebody picks it up. The head of an intelligence service, he says, is more likely to give the order than the head of state. He also tells the story of Vasili Khokhlov, a trained killer sent to West Germany who refused the job, defected, and later lived in California. The KGB once sent Barsky to see if the man still lived there. They looked at each other. Neither knew who the other was.

On Ukraine he is not looking for symmetry of sins so much as a record of ignored speech. Savvy observers, a small minority, saw the war coming because Putin had been open about restoring a strong Russia, something like empire, uniting Russian speakers. The world ignored him. The United States, in Barsky's view, indulged wishful thinking — Obama's reset, no real response to Crimea, an essay under Putin's name two years before the 2022 invasion that was again quite clear. Force was how you do that. America's sin, as he frames it first, was failing to stop the shooting with sanctions while it was still words. Fridman pushes back: NATO expansion, the arming of Ukraine, the military-industrial complex Eisenhower named, a messianic streak that wants the world to become America. Barsky agrees the complex exists and is powerful, that Afghanistan was never going to be a functioning democracy, and that Ukraine and Russia are “two peas in a pod,” among Europe's most corrupt, one of them the aggressor. He thinks the situation is as dangerous as any he has lived through, not because it is already at maximum escalation but because a protracted crisis raises the chance of an accident — one rocket, and, in Fridman's nightmare, a nuclear “message” against a non-NATO Ukraine.

Putin, Barsky has said elsewhere, was not a good KGB agent and is an excellent politician and organizer — the man Yeltsin hired to clean up a country that had become a mix of oligarchy, criminal enterprise, and chaos. The training was different: Barsky was one-on-one; Putin went to school. The simple tell, for Barsky, is language. Putin knows German pretty well, and they sent him to East Germany, not West Germany, Switzerland, or Austria, where one would think the best went. Oleg Kalugin, once head of counterintelligence for the First Directorate, told Barsky to his face that Putin was not an impressive trainee or agent. Fridman will not take that as gospel; Kalugin has his own war with Putin. Barsky, who likes to tell people that in intelligence you never know the truth a hundred percent, takes the certainty back. Lying and influencing, he still thinks, are agent skills that help a politician rise.

Yuri Bezmenov's four-step picture of ideological subversion — demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization — Barsky calls a fraud. Active measures were real: fake news, election meddling aimed at both fringes. Vasili Mitrokhin devoted a chapter to the department that produced them, and it was, in that account, among the least desirable desks in the KGB, staffed by people inventing stories about countries they did not know well. Two famous successes: the story that AIDS was concocted in a CIA lab, and the story that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser, placed in a French magazine and then picked up by bigger papers. A timed, multi-decade campaign to remake the American mind is, Barsky thinks, beyond what the service he knew could do. They could not even teach him how the country operated. Bezmenov was a low-level man in India; compartmentalization was the one thing the KGB did really well; how would he have been briefed on a super-secret master plan? He made it up, Barsky says, and Americans ate it up because it meant the damage was not their fault. Modern tools are another matter. An army of nerds plus people who actually know the target culture could do more than the old active-measures desk. Putin, unlike the old KGB, is also willing to have agents caught. Getting caught scares people, and he likes that. Maria Butina, communicating with Moscow on social media, was a rank amateur and still reasonably successful. Barsky has no idea how many serious illegals are here. Not thousands like him: they are too hard to train, and they were not that successful to begin with. Amateurs, asked to do something for the motherland, are another count.

By December 1988 he thought the tour was nearly up — ten to twelve years had been the rumor of a limit — though no one had said he was done. One morning in Queens he walked past the support beam of the elevated A train, the signal spot he checked every day and never expected to see used. There was a red mark, about the size of his fist. The meaning was severe danger: get out of the country as soon as possible. Protocol said do not even go home. Collect reserve documents hidden in a Bronx park and make a beeline for the Canadian border. He went to work instead, sat in a cubicle, and stared at a screen. The only thought that would form was what to do. Chelsea was eighteen months old. He had been there when she was born, taken her home, watched first steps, been looked at with those big eyes. That, he says, was his reentry into the human race. Love came back, completely unexpected. A lot of fathers, especially fathers of girls, understand. Her mother was from South America and had a fourth-grade education. Leaving the child to that future was not a plan he could finish.

Monday he did nothing. Thursday was a regular shortwave slot; Moscow said they had reason to believe the FBI was on his case and he should execute the emergency procedure. He still had excuses — a broken radio, a hospital, a prior three-week silence when he had been sick. Then they forced his hand. Waiting for the A train on a dark morning, a short man in a black trench coat came up from the right and whispered, with a heavy Russian accent, “You gotta come back or else you're dead.” It was the only time a Soviet agent came near him on U.S. soil. An American might have said busted or arrested. Dead, from a service with a history of hunting defectors, had to be taken seriously. He talked himself into hearing bad phrasing. He also knew that both sides now knew. The next radiogram ordered a dead drop on Staten Island, money and a passport, at a spot he had chosen and described, scheduled for darkness. He went, because the money let him postpone the decision; he could always throw the passport away. The park was almost a little forest. Next to a fallen tree he was supposed to find a crushed oil can, hard to miss. He had a flashlight. He did not find it. It was the only such operation that failed, and it did not make sense.

Walking away, emotionally numb, he said to himself: I'm staying. The decision, he says, was made for him. He is a Christian now, and he thinks God told him. The cover story he then wrote in secret ink was, in his own ranking, the best lie of his life. He wished he could come home; he could not, because he had contracted HIV. In those years AIDS was a death sentence, and no country wanted the patient. He had heard Muscovites snicker about America's depraved culture, people killing each other; he traced the infection to a girlfriend he had already reported, a woman with a former boyfriend who used drugs. They believed it a hundred percent. They gave some of his dollar savings to his German family and told them he was already dead. He guesses the courier kept half. For three months he varied his route to work. Then he threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson and destroyed the remaining one-time pads. He told Chelsea's mother they should buy a house. A year later they were in the suburbs. Then another child. A career, moves, a McMansion — and before that, a house in rural Pennsylvania, which is where the FBI found him.

The trail was Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-level KGB archivist in charge of moving files from the Lubyanka to Yasenevo. He hated the system for a concrete reason: a very ill son who could have been treated in England, a trip the authorities would not allow. He copied notes by hand, smuggled the slips out in his underwear and socks, typed them up, and buried the pages at his dacha. In 1992, with the Soviet Union gone, he walked into the U.S. embassy in Moscow on a weekend. A junior officer said they were not interested; the material was old. A career-limiting move, Barsky calls it. Mitrokhin went to a Baltic republic, contacted MI6, and was told to come in for a cup of tea. The British shared a thin file with the FBI: an illegal named Jack Barsky, operating in the northeast of the United States. If the name had been Jim Miller they might never have found him. They checked Social Security. Jack Barsky had gotten his card at thirty-three.

They spent almost three years watching from a distance, because a still-active illegal would have noticed. Barsky had stopped surveillance detection altogether after those first three months. The FBI bought the one neighboring house when it went up for sale and parked agents there. They still planted a bug in the kitchen. He and his wife were fighting; she complained constantly; one day he reached for what he calls the nuclear option, the list of what he had sacrificed to be with her and Chelsea. The microphone caught the confession: he had been a KGB agent, he had quit, he had stayed for them. That told the Bureau he was inactive — turning him would have been pointless — and that he still knew things worth hearing. They decided to treat him nicely.

A Friday evening, a toll plaza on a bridge over the Hudson, a state trooper, a routine stop, then “step out of the car.” Barsky had, by then, forgotten he had ever been a spy. A man came from the right, flipped a credential, and said the FBI would like to talk. That man, Joe Riley, later became a friend and godfather to Barsky's youngest, Trinity. Riley told him the blood left his face. He recovered fast. In the car another agent had a gun at his ankle. First question: am I under arrest? No. Then instinct: “So what took you so long?” He saw a smile. He knew he had to make them like him. At a motel they had taken over a whole wing, guards at both ends, binders labeled with his early years — props that told him how little they knew. Before the interview he volunteered the only strategy that would limit the damage to his family: complete cooperation. Two hours later they let him go, after covering every intersection in case he ran. He had no thought of running. He cooperated for a long time, lived under the old identity until the paperwork could be made real without witness protection, and had to change the birth year because the original Jack Barsky had been born in 1944, and keeping it would have meant collecting Social Security four years early. When Homeland Security finally called and asked if he could come in tomorrow, he started to check his calendar, then heard himself. He was sworn in on the spot. Walking out, he had a country again.

He had not wanted to be public. The dots that made him public were almost too unlikely to connect: a half-brother of his wife in Germany, a visit to someone who lived fifty miles from their house, a railroad conductor who knew someone who knew a star reporter at *Der Spiegel*, who knew Steve Kroft of *60 Minutes*. At Microsoft headquarters a young woman whose job title was storyteller asked, in the Q&A, for the number-one lesson of his life. He had never been asked. He thought for twenty seconds and said love conquers all, because in his life, in the end, it did. He could have stayed loyal to the German wife he loved; then he would have betrayed the child who became a source of so much love. You choose your regrets, he says; you do not get to void them. He does not regret lying to his mother, with whom he had no real emotional life, even though she wrote Gorbachev, checked with the Stasi, and died without knowing. His cover had been a forged invitation to a Kazakh space-research outfit that did not exist; a classmate spread the rumor that he had died in a rocket accident. Years later he called the girl who had dumped him, told her to hold onto her chair, and heard, when two people in their sixties finally met, that she had made a really bad mistake. Tears. He later met her husband, and privately disagreed: there was nothing left. It had been passionate, puppy love, as strong in its hour as the love for his daughters. He is afraid of death even as a Christian. He has hope, not certainty. He runs four or five times a week and means to lift again, because a doctor he once read warned that most people let the rest of life be a slow downward move. The Christian morality, he says, he can sign with his blood. There is a short sentence in the Bible: God is love.