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From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who.

Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia.

The illegals were a group of Russian sleeper agents operating in the United States,

tasked with gathering intelligence and infiltrating key areas of American society.

They looked like ordinary people.

They worked, they had families, they drank with friends,

but each was secretly driven by the need to collect sensitive information,

attempt to shape U.S. policy

and exploit vulnerabilities within the American

government and its systems. Jack Barski, not the name he was born with, was possibly the most

successful illegal. Using multiple aliases and intense espionage training, he entered America

in 1978 with a long-term aim of gathering intelligence

and getting close to policymakers to influence them. As Ronald Reagan deemed the Soviet Union the

evil empire and Cold War tensions escalated, Jack was ideally placed to begin America's destruction from the inside.

But this was before his life was turned upside down by the arrival of an American-born daughter, Chelsea.

From that moment on, he wanted out.

In this episode, I'm going to speak to Jack about what made him so driven to succeed

in America, how he was recruited in East Germany, the emotional discipline required to be this

kind of spy, and also the ethics of engaging in some pretty dark acts in a bid to gain the

advantage over your enemy.

This episode is brought to you by Netflix,

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