Book of the day - Deep Undercover by Jack Barsky
I find it fascinating how dedicated Deter (Jack Barsky) is. The idea that he was already highly educated and top of his class, then went back to college to establish himself with some form of a background for why he had the knowledge he had versus a bike messenger with a highs school level education.
What’s my important takeaway: I love seeing how manufactured a life can be to rub elbows with influencers and that’s explicitly the goal of a spy; to be among the influencers of a nation. How do you go from being an absolute nobody (Bike messenger in Deter’s case) to surrounding yourself with those in the world that are making things happen? That’s the job of a spy. If your goal in life is to be a mover and shaker, I imagine you can apply a lot of how a Russian spy is built and apply it to your own life to increase your wealth.
Today I reflected back, something about the final chapters of the book makes the entire book suspicious to me. How easily it is for Jack to become a devout Christian. How he seems to always fall in love with these women from Toronto. How Toronto repeatedly seems to be the way foreign agents enter the USA and he seems to keep having kids with these women. He seems to have such ease with falling into some new life and dedicate every ounce of his being to it, is pretty much what he was trained to do as a spy. He’s mercurial and suspect to me. How the entire book is him describing through his own life what is essentially, “The American Dream” like that’s what the FBI wants to hear to make Jack seem like a convert. How Jack seems to suddenly despise the world he came from.
To me, that’s just now how life is. You don’t suddenly pledge allegiance to a new nation after your entire life was dedicated to another cause and believe that you don’t have a weakness for that original cause if the opportunity came knocking. If Jack became disgruntled with the American capitalist ways, he would simply fall back to his Marxism even stronger than before. So, in the end I’m marking Jack as a sleeper that was in it for the long shot and got caught. Now the FBI is using him as a tool to encourage other sleepers to show that, “Hey, come out, it’s okay. Nobody is going to hurt you.” That’s my random theory. This book just reads too much like a fabrication of, “The American Dream” and I don’t believe it.
I enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the storytelling most.
