Being a KGB sleeper agent for 30 years left Jack Barsky without ‘true love’
He led a double life for almost 30 years working as a sleeper agent for the KGB, but Jack Barsky has one last mission to uncover his true identity and live a normal life.
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He led a double life for almost 30 years, working as a sleeper agent for the KGB after assuming the identity of an American boy who died aged 10.
But Jack Barsky – real name Albrecht Dittrich – says there’s still one mission he’s yet to accomplish – to find love.
The 72- year-old is only now reconnecting with his true identity and says the drama of keeping up a double life as a sleeper agent spying on the United States pushed him into short relationships to relieve his loneliness and destroyed the trust of two true loves.
“Eight months ago I took the final step to feeling comfortable and knowing who I am, even though getting divorced from the love of my life was painful,” he said in a candid interview from his home in Austin, Texas.
“But I’ve recovered. What I’m missing is the ability to serve my wife and my daughter but I’m still hungry for another partner in my life.
“Love is the most important word in my life. It sounds corny but love conquers all; it’s taken a while to realise that.
“I’m in excellent health, my numbers are good and I have lots of energy.”
Barsky has lived a banal life for almost three decades as a programmer and public speaker in the “enemy” country he first arrived in as a young spy at the height of the Cold War in 1978.
He married Penelope, a woman from Guyana he met through a newspaper advert, and settled into family life raising their daughter Chelsea, now 36. He told her about his past when she turned 18.
“This love interest was safe, because she was not a born American and could not detect there was something non-American about me,” he explains.
“Once I was discovered, I stopped acting; I was able to unite the two persons in me, the German and the American,” he says with relief.
“But it’s only recently that I reconnected with the young boy that I was, the college student recruited by the KGB.”
Born Albrecht Dittrich in 1949 in East Germany to a schoolteacher father, a devoted Marxist-Leninist, and a mother he describes as “unemotional” and “hard”, he was a standout chemistry masters student at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
In his fourth year, a man knocked on his dormitory door and asked if would be interested in a career with optical company Carl Zeiss.
“He was a lying idiot,” he recalls.
“No one then recruited graduates in East Germany. I thought it was the Stasi (the East German intelligence agency), he was a collaborator for the KGB.”
The stranger invited Dittrich to dinner at an expensive restaurant the following week, where he was introduced to “comrade Herman”, who spoke German with a Russian accent. Herman asked if he would take on undercover work.
“We developed an informal relationship for 18 months. He studied me. He became a replacement for a father, who was a non-entity in my life.
“They were looking for bright, quick, thinker, adventurous, and very flexible. It was me,” he says.
LISTEN TO BARSKY’S SECRETS TO BEING A SPY
Herman sent him to East Berlin for three weeks’ training. The final day he was driven to the Soviet Army headquarters, also the KGB HQ, on the outskirts of the city, where a short, high-ranking KGB agent barked at him “Are you in or not?”. He was 23 and given a day to decide.
“I was asked to become a hero and help establish communism … Marxism believes the world would become one entity where everyone would be happy. Romantic. But I bought into it,” he says.
“We had our own Communist James Bond driving fancy cars in the west who had gorgeous girlfriends. It didn’t turn out that way for me.”
He left one month later, February 1973, with the cover story of going to Berlin to join the foreign ministry as a diplomat.
He met his KGB handler Nikoli in the city and spent two years training as a spy – morse code, cryptology, secret writing, microdot identification, dead drop operations (spycraft technique used to pass intelligence), learning surveillance, English and studying the United States.
Unbeknown to him, he had been selected for the Soviet “illegals” program in the US, the most elite part of the KGB’s operations for spies who operated without diplomatic immunity.
Two more years’ training in Moscow and in June 1978 he was ready to enter the US under the fake identity of a boy who had died aged 10 in Maryland – Jack Barsky.
His mission: profile government foreign policy advisers, and President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, report how Americans react to big world events, execute special assignments in remote parts of US, observe a naval weapon station in New Jersey, and identify ships based on silhouettes for signs of preparing for war.
Before moving to Moscow, he had broken up with his girlfriend, Gerlinde, “a true love” but when he returned home before his deployment, she declared she still loved him.
They rekindled their relationship and he confessed a version of the truth.
He took trips back to Moscow and East Germany every two years.
On his first trip back, in 1980, he married Gerlinde before leaving for another two years, begging her to wait. They share a son, Matthias.
Lonely and with no way of contacting Gerlinde from New York, he dated Penelope, a flight attendant from Guyana. She needed to get married to remain in the US.
Eighteen months after Chelsea was born, he got the message from the KGB to run.
“They said ‘come home or else you’re dead’ … they operated the emergency procedure,” he said. The plan was to leave the country for Canada, go to the embassy in Ottawa and get extradited home with false documents.
“But I had fallen in love with this little girl with big brown eyes and curls.”
They had another child, a son Jessie, and when he confessed the truth about his life, Penelope left him.
Six years later the FBI received a tip from MI6, from files smuggled out of KGB archives, saying an illegal was living in Pennsylvania. They later arrested him while driving, and said, if he co-operated, he might not go to prison.
“I told them everything,” he said.
In 2009, he received a green card, and in August 2014, received a genuine US passport, in the name of Jack Barsky, the identity stolen by the KGB.
After the second marriage collapsed, he worked as a programmer, then as a head of IT and began a slow romance with his assistant, Shawna, whom he married and shares a daughter Trinity, 12. They divorced eight months ago.
“All my life I’ve only ever been in love with two women, the last one just divorced me eight months ago,” he said.
“The first one was Gerlinde, who lives in Germany in isolation and says she’s changed her mind.
“I’m stoic, I can handle adversity. I wish I never opened that door. I was a functioning alcoholic for a while, I drank to sleep, the risks were not worth taking.
“But I finally know myself.”
His autobiography, Deep Undercover, was published in 2017.
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