Book review - Deep Undercover by Jack Barsky. It’ not like Spook Street - this is the real thing

A while ago I reviewed Spook Street by Mick Herron, and when I came across Deep Undercover, I thought that a book about real life espionage would be an interesting read.

Jack Barsky’s real name is Albrecht Dittrich, an East German who was studying to be a chemistry professor, when in 1970 the East German authorities asked him to become a spy.  The KGB trained him to be an undercover agent in America, whose mission was to become integrated into American society and get close to the national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.  

Once in America, Barsky was basically left to fend for himself.  His first job was as a bicycle courier, with night school learning to be a computer programmer, working his way up in a life insurance company through diligence and talent.  His cover was compromised in 1988, but he refused to leave America because of his American family and was eventually caught by the FBI.  Barsky provided the FBI with information about his undercover activities and was never charged with espionage.

Deep Undercover shows the reality of espionage and particularly living undercover.  Barsky had to work extremely hard to make a living, for a long time through menial jobs – a huge contrast from his comfortable academic life in East Germany.  For years, his life in America is lonely and isolated.  I wondered how he managed to overcome the emotion of leaving his wife in East Germany, only meeting her for short visits every few years and then seeing his son growing up, regarding him as an occasional uncle rather than his father.  Also, I wasn’t sure how he managed the emotions of a new family in America, knowing that he had a wife and child in East Germany.  It seems like compartmentalising your life is an essential ability for an undercover spy.

Although Barsky comes across as an arrogant person, and at time lacking in any kind of empathy, you can see that deep down he’s a genuine person.  He’s pretty frank about his dysfunctional relationships, excessive drinking and his redemption through his conversion to Christianity.  

It’s a cliché in reviews of espionage novels that “this book shows what it’s really like to be a spy” and few of them actually do that.  What Deep Undercover does and does really well is show Barsky’s real life as a sleeper agent, warts and all.  His training programme was based on a “sink or swim” principle, which follows on to his whole undercover life in America, where assistance from the Centre is perfunctory at best.  For many years Barsky is lonely and financially hard up.  It says a lot about his inner strength that he managed to hold everything together for so many years.  Barsky’s life deep undercover lacks glamour and there’s no sugar coating at all.  Perhaps one thing that is absent is anything about a fear of being exposed or caught, which is a constant in other similar memoirs that I’ve read.  Perhaps he compartmentalised that too and ignored that fear, or maybe his self-confidence meant that he didn’t worry about it.  

Final verdict – Deep Undercover is a readable book, which I’d strongly recommend

Romancrimeblogger

PS - here's a link to YouTube for a short interview with Barsky:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ir_oW-OXDY