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.
1955
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.
1969
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.
1973
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.
1975
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.
1978
In 1978, Dittrich was sent to the United States as a sleeper agent.
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.
1980
Barsky noted that the Soviets in the 1980s were trying to recruit right-wing radicals as sources.
1984
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.
2017
His autobiography, Deep Undercover, was published in 2017, and he frequently speaks on his experiences and as an expert on espionage.
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.
