There was a great piece on a Russian Spy’s covert insertion into American culture, and the FBI’s identification and surveillance of him on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. There were some gems regarding surveillance in it, but you had to look.
Voiceover: “It was a difficult decision, but he agreed to join the KGB and eventually found himself in Moscow, undergoing intensive training.”
Jack Barsky: “A very large part of the training was operational work. Determination as to whether you’re being under surveillance.”
If you are going to do anything of meaning where you could acquire any level of authority or influence, even minor things, you need to understand surveillance. It is a key part of espionage, only because espionage plays for all the marbles. But espionage isn’t the only part of the world playing for all the marbles. Whether you see it or not, in every strata of success in our highly evolved social hierarchy, from business, to political, to criminal, it is Darwinian. Those who have dominated, and who are at the top, have gotten there through a mix of ruthlessness and total environmental awareness, which means they have picked up on the competition before the competition was even aware of there was competition, and seized every bit of intelligence they could to gain full control. J Edgar Hoover had tapes on everyone so he could control them, and once that Rubicon was crossed, the next wannabe shadowy cabal leader wasn’t going to destroy the tapes, and never tape anyone ever again. That means surveillance is how the competition works, whether your business is government contracts, or preventing a home invasion. Those who didn’t use surveillance have already been replaced by those who do, in most of the important areas. Learn to spot surveillance, especially as we now head into a particularly disordered period.
Jack Barsky: The Jack Barsky birth certificate that somebody had obtained and I was given. I didn’t have to get this myself.
Steve Kroft: Did you feel strange walking around with this identity of a child?
Jack Barsky: No. No. When you do this kind of work, some things you don’t think about. Because if you explore, you may find something you don’t like.
Part of the job. Don’t think if the FBI shows up on your doorstep someday, that they will be nice because you were a patriotic law-abiding American who supported Law Enforcement and our nation’s warriors, or because as LE, they must believe in freedom and the Constitution like you. If they show up with the orders, and you are a target, they won’t look too closely, lest they stumble upon some feel-bad that interferes with their job. That just goes with the territory.
If you are law-abiding during the collapse, and they are on you, then you have to assume they are gathering intel for someone else who will do something at some point to neutralize you – maybe food contamination, maybe a car accident with a dump truck, maybe even gamma irradiation of your house while you sleep. Historically it is periods of unrest, like what is coming, when governments do the bad things you read about in history books, out of a fear of losing power and being exposed to the instability.
Know the risks, randomize your movements and food purchases, but understand your choices are probably being careful, and then getting cancer and dying quietly they way they’d want you to, or pushing as hard as you reasonably can to maybe help the innocents they will go after, after they are done with you. If it comes to that point, there won’t be good options, so do what the founders did – don’t worry about the details, do what’s right, and trust in God.
Jack Barsky: There’s three things I tell people that the Russians were afraid of. AIDS, Jewish people and Ronald Reagan. And they were deathly…
Steve Kroft: In that order?
Jack Barsky: I think Ronald Reagan took the top spot. They thought he would push the button.
Reagan successfully used r-selected conflict-avoidant behavioral traits to control the behavior of the Communists. Yes, Commies would be ruthless – if the opportunity arose to do so without consequence. But make it clear that you want to fight to hurt them, and they will make careful note of it. Note, how different that is – nobody ever said Reagan was afraid that somebody on the other side would push the button. K’s don’t fear the reality of what is – they prepare for the worst, and steel themselves to deal with it. That nature terrifies rabbits.
The FBI began following Barsky, and when this surveillance photo caught him talking to a native of Cuba, the bureau grew increasingly concerned…
FBI agent Joe Reilly went so far as to set up an observation post on a hillside behind Barsky’s house. This is a picture he took of his view.
Joe Reilly: I got a telescope and binoculars, as if I was a birdwatcher. But I was looking at his backyard and at him. Over time, I learned a great deal about him.
Surveillance can be obvious. Would you ask what the chances are of a birdwatcher just happening to set up his telescope pointed at you, or would you think it paranoid to believe you were under some type of surveillance, and thus assume by default that the guy with the binoculars is just a birdwatcher? It is the desire on the part of the target to not be “paranoid” which surveillance is often really hiding behind.
But that wasn’t enough for the FBI. The bureau bought the house next door to get a closer look at the Barskys.
Steve Kroft: Did you get a good deal?
Joe Reilly: I think we paid what he was asking. (laughing) And we had agents living there so that we could be sure who was coming and going from his house without being too obvious in our surveillance.
All Standard Operating Procedure, any time federal surveillance is deployed. If you see foot units you have cars, and if you have cars, those cars have houses, probably as close to you as possible. The visible occupants may even have day jobs unrelated to surveillance, and if you examine their background, it will usually be exceedingly difficult to link them to any government agency – obviously by design. They may even just be doing surveillance as a side-gig on contract to a private sector investigative agency which retains all records, and thus their reports won’t turn up on any FOIA request. It is all a big pre-prepared, exceedingly thorough procedure that is rolled out together. Such an operation is not as rare as you would think, in today’s age of terrorism-related surveillance mega-budgets.
The innocent residents of the house the Bureau bought next to Barsky were under top level surveillance for weeks to months, to determine if they knew the target (and would compromise things if approached), and to see if they had any skeletons in closets which could be used to make them pliable. This would have included the telephone-pole mics recording private conversations in their houses. Its creepy, but Federal Surveillance plays for keeps.
The FBI did not just buy the one house next door to him, either. They probably bought or rented five to ten houses in that neighborhood at least, with as many sightlines around his house as possible, as well as other houses spread out near areas he frequented, and at critical decision points along regular routes he traveled. They did this both to saturate the environment with static observation posts (which are more difficult to detect), and to allow the staging of the massive numbers of vehicle surveillance units which would have been deployed on a well trained, hardened KGB target like Barsky.
The Vehicle Surveillance teams, and the stealth operators hired on at the stores he’d shop at and the places he’d frequent, can’t just fill up all of the local motels and roll out on 8AM, 4PM, and 12 AM shifts, without risking exposure through town gossip. So they are moved into houses as if they live there, and many even get jobs and set up cash businesses like landscaping gigs, photography businesses (they have extensive training in photography, so it is an easy transition) or maid services, to justify their presence, open access to homes and properties, and pad their covers. Federal surveillance is amazingly thorough and immense in scale once it is brought to bear, and with the massive increases in budgets of late, it is being brought to bear much more frequently.
They also almost certainly got unwarranted ears in Barsky’s house immediately through the deployment of the telephone-pole phase interference mics. These are not Marquis of Queensbury rules, and I’m sure this operational budget was practically unlimited. If you think they would never go so far as to do something or fork out the massive dollars to do something, then that something has a bullet point in their training manual, and is one of the first things they will do, to get one-up on their target.
Steve Kroft: You had no idea the FBI was living next door to you?
Jack Barsky: No.
Steve Kroft: Never saw…
Jack Barsky: No.
Steve Kroft: …Joe Reilly up on the hill with the binoculars?
Jack Barsky: Absolutely not.
The hall of mirrors. A professional will always strive to not let his surveillance know it was burned, or know his exact capabilities in detection. This was one highly-trained, exceedingly hard-target, and by its nature surveillance is difficult to conceal, even from amateurs – there are always guys on such a large team who take careless risks, screw up, and expose themselves.
Did he know? Didn’t he know? Did a highly trained KGB stealth operator miss a guy with a telescope pointed at him, a camera with a telephoto lens in his hands, and binoculars around his neck? Was he even defunct, or was the story about getting called back, and claiming he had AIDS due to love for his daughter, a deeper legend to allow a long term sleeper to continue to work at high levels in American business, and cover his ass if caught? Was he active and the Cuban was his go between with the Russian Embassy through the diplomat renter? Impossible to know, but I’d bet my ass he is lying about not seeing the surveillance.
When the FBI finally got authorization from the Justice Department to bug Barsky’s home, the case broke wide open.
Joe Reilly: Within, I’d say, the first two weeks that we had microphones in his house, he had an argument with his wife in the kitchen. And during the course of that dispute, he readily admitted that he was an agent, operating from the Soviet Union.
There are two possibilities here. They put the bugs in, and within two weeks, he oincidentally made his first-ever admission of being a spy for the Soviets. Or he had been making such admissions all along, they had been listening over the telephone-pole mics and hearing them, and they finally decided to find some other pretext to get the ears inside made official, so they could use the audio to seal their case. I’m betting they wouldn’t have risked the surreptitious entry on such a hard target unless they already knew it would give them exactly what they wanted. If Barsky was the real deal and on his game, he would have threaded his doors, left dust traps, and had all sorts of other ways to know if anybody had entered his home while he was out, make a surreptitious entry much more of a risk than a benefit.
The FBI questioned Barsky throughout the weekend and gave him a polygraph test that he passed. Convinced that his spying days were over, and that his friendship with the Cuban was just that, the FBI decided to keep the whole thing quiet and allowed Barsky to go back to work on Monday morning.
Steve Kroft: Was he charged with something?
Joe Reilly: No.
Steve Kroft: Even though he confessed to being a Soviet spy?
Joe Reilly: Yes.
Steve Kroft: That seems odd.
Joe Reilly: Well, we wanted him to cooperate with us. We didn’t want to put him in jail. He was no use to us there.
With both Law Enforcement Intelligence, and Intelligence Law Enforcement, there are no rules. Whitey Bulger was planting dead bodies all around Boston like petunias, but so long as he was providing intel to his handler, he was bulletproof. He walked into an innocent man’s house with one of his goons, told him he was taking his liquor store, handed the guy’s four year old daughter a loaded gun, and said she could play with it until her father signed over the deed. He walked out of the house with the store, and under government protection. Nothing could be done. Bulger had the golden ticket.
You can break the law any way you want, and they can make it all go away. Or you can be law abiding, and end up in the can for having ten kilos of Coke found in your trunk. Good for results when they focus on the right enemies, but some day soon, as more easily triggerable Marxist SJW’s infiltrate our government, conservatives may end up being those enemies.
The FBI agent who apprehended him, Joe Reilly, still believes in Barsky. And in yet another twist to this story, the two are good friends and golfing buddies.
Joe Reilly: He’s a very honest person. And if you want to find out how honest someone is, play golf with them.
Steve Kroft: But you’re a former FBI guy and he’s a former spy. What’s the bond?
Joe Reilly: It’s personal. He credits me for keeping him out of prison.
The funniest part of the piece. This is almost certainly a stealth layer of surveillance left on Barsky by the Bureau. I’d be shocked if Barsky doesn’t know it. So you have an ex-FBI surveillance agent keeping tabs on the old Russian spy to make sure he doesn’t suddenly go active or otherwise do something embarrassing to the Bureau, and the old Russian spy making nice with the FBI agent to open his life to the Bureau so he can keep his deal and his happy life, while both pretend neither knows what is going on, and they are just old friends who both enjoy golf.
At the international espionage level it is good we have people who do this, but that life is not for everybody.
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What’s your opinion on why r-types screech about the cruelty of capital punishment for murderers?
And we wonder how the parasite that is the political system (with endless mouths to feed) is killing the host?