Free Republic

"Putin resigned from the KGB after the Soviet Union existed no more but he had a very good network that helped and that helped him come to power" Former KGB sleeper agent Jack Barsky discusses the formative weakest moment that set Putin on the path to create a 'greater Russia'.

How do you quit the KGB without getting "eliminated"? Jack Barsky tells the real-life spy story of how he came to America as a Soviet sleeper agent for the KGB, but started enjoying his new life in America so much he dangerously chose to leave his old life behind.

Jack Barsky kept his calm as he neared the traffic circle underneath the West Side Highway overpass. In his hand he held a piece of chalk and furtively drew a straight horizontal line on the wall as he walked past. If a pedestrian happened to notice it, they might think it a mark made by a kid, or perhaps nothing it all. But when a certain undercover KGB operative spotted the chalk mark as he drove from his compound in The Bronx to his cover job at the United Nations, he would inform his comrades, and they would know what...

Jack Barsky died in September 1955, at the age of 10, and was buried in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in the suburbs of Washington DC. His name is on the passport of the man sitting before me now - a youthful 67-year-old East German, born Albert Dittrich. The passport is not a fake. Albert Dittrich is Jack Barsky in the eyes of the US government. The story of how this came to be is, by Barsky's own admission, "implausible" and "ridiculous", even by the standards of Cold War espionage. But as he explains in a new memoir, Deep Undercover, it...