An MSNBC guest on Thursday who had once worked for the KGB intelligence agency compared President Donald Trump and his clashes with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the disdain former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had for his own secret service.
Jack Barsky, when asked by host Chris Jansing if he agreed that morale at the FBI is low, replied: “You know, this is like sort of reminiscent -- and I got to be really careful here so I don’t get misquoted -- but Stalin, in the old days, had a really well-functioning intelligence agency, and he didn’t trust them.”
After speaking with another KGB defector and MSNBC contributor Naveed Jamli, Jansing told Barsky:
I wonder if you feel the same way or what you’re hearing is the same about morale at the FBI right now to pick up on what [NBC News Correspondent] Pete Williams had to say, which was something that he saw as a major outcome so far in this young hearing.
When asked what effect it would have on the Russia investigation, [Acting FBI Director Andrew] McCabe said: “You can’t stop them from doing the right thing.” Let me get your take on that.
“Well,” Barsky noted, “I agree with Naveed here with regard to that we need to allow our intelligence agencies to do their work.”
“I absolutely, from day one, when this all broke,” he continued, “I didn’t like the fact that, you know, the FBI -- and particularly, James Comey -- became a target of a political football, so to speak -- back and forth; back and forth.”
““Now, here’s the point,” Barsky asserted. “We are at a point now where, particularly, our president, you know, made statements that he doesn’t trust our intelligence agencies. Then why have them?”
“But at the same time, what I don’t like is that we are trying to play out these issues right now in public -- sort of interfering, in some sense, with the FBI doing their work,” he added.
According to an article by former NewsBusters analyst Matthew Balan on Mediaite, Jansing had brought on Jamli, “who once worked as an FBI double agent, to discuss the ongoing Comey controversy.”
Balan noted: “The former KGB spy was born Albert Dittrich in East Germany. According to a February 2017 profile” written by BBC reporter Bryan Wheeler that was entitled “Jack Barsky; The KGB Spy Who Lived the American Dream,” he “arrived in New York City in 1978 under an assumed identity."
He “soon took the Barsky identity, which was the name of a deceased 10-year-old boy who was buried in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C.,” Balan stated.
“Barsky was ultimately exposed as a Soviet spy by Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the West in 1992,” he continued. “The FBI monitored him and finally confronted him. But he cooperated with the federal agents, who helped him to become an American citizen.”
The BBC article noted that Barsky “also found God, completing his journey from a hard-line communist and atheist to a churchgoing, all-American patriot.”
“He has even managed to reconnect with the family he left behind in Germany, although his first wife, Gerlinde, is still not speaking to him,” Wheeler stated.
With a background like that, it’s no wonder he has to be “careful” when discussing leaders in America and the former Soviet Union, which was dissolved in 1991.
