Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  I had no idea what he was talking about, so I quickly walked away. Only later did I learn that Bryant Park was a hangout for small-time drug dealers and he was offering to sell me a few joints, not asking to bum a cigarette.

  Immediately upon moving into the hotel that would be my home for the foreseeable future, I established an observable pattern for the staff at the front desk. I wanted to give the impression that I had business in the city and avoid even the hint of suspicion that comes with the appearance of an erratic lifestyle.

  So, Monday through Friday, regardless of the weather, I left the hotel no later than 8:30 in the morning and returned after 5:00 p.m. When the weather was good, I continued to explore the vast city and catalogued potential spots for future operational use. When winter arrived—thankfully much milder than the Moscow freeze—I spent time at the library, museums, or watching movies at one of the second-rate theaters, where two dollars could buy you three hours of American classic cinema, thereby adding bits and pieces to my knowledge of American pop culture.

  When spring arrived, I often grabbed a towel and a book, and spent the day in Central Park. On one such afternoon, as I lay in the sunshine and stared up at the blue sky, I realized it was May 18, 1979—Albrecht Dittrich’s thirtieth birthday. But this German, “Dittrich,” was no more. The American flag high atop one of the buildings was a fluttering red-white-and-blue reminder that I was a stranger in a strange land.

  Earlier in 1979, I had begun the process of acquiring genuine US documentation. The sketchy plan concocted by the spymasters in Moscow was brilliant in its conception but flawed in its details of execution.

  The first step, obtaining a library card, was expected to be child’s play. But when I visited a number of branches of the New York Public Library, the first thing I was asked—without fail—was to show some type of ID or a utility bill, to prove my address. Of course, I had neither one.

  The need to have identification in order to obtain identification is a classic example of what Joseph Heller—whose signature book I had read with great pleasure—called a Catch-22. Was I really going to get stuck in neutral right at the beginning of this ambitious undertaking? And if I couldn’t get a library card, what did that say about my prospects for one day getting close to Zbigniew Brzezinski?

  To my disappointment, the Center had no advice for how to break the stalemate. I knew it was up to me to figure it out, and I certainly wasn’t ready to give up yet. After several weeks spent scouring books and studying newspapers to find a possible solution for my dilemma, serendipity came to the rescue.

  The American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West, with its long hallways, wide staircases, and many cavernous rooms, had become one of my favorite places for surveillance detection. One day I noticed a flyer on the reception desk advertising museum membership. For a reasonable fee, I received a one-year membership entitling me to unlimited visits and discounts at special events. But the only thing that mattered to me was that the museum issued me a membership card with my name and address on it, no verification of identity or address required. This type of card seemed like a long shot as proof of address at a library, but it was worth a try. After all, I had been in the US for almost six months and had made zero progress toward the final goal of acquiring proper identification.

  I chose the main Brooklyn branch of the public library system for my Hail Mary pass. After taking a deep breath to calm my nerves, I approached the desk and waited for the librarian to look up at me.

  “May I help you?”

  “I would like to get a library card. Here’s my application.”

  She took the application and said, “We need proof of residence as well.”

  “Sure. I have my museum card.” I handed it across the desk to her.

  “Okay, give me a minute while I fill this out.”

  It took me a moment to realize that my application had been accepted. The plan was back on track!

  Step 2 was getting a New York driver’s license. I now had the minimum documentation required—a library card and a birth certificate—so all I had to do was pass the written and behind-the-wheel tests. The written test wasn’t much of a challenge, but I didn’t want to take a chance with the road test, so I took several driving lessons to refresh the basic skills I had acquired in Moscow.

  The driving test turned out to be simple as well—almost trivial, in fact. Frankly, I would not allow anyone behind the wheel and out on the streets of the city based on the elementary skills required to pass that test. But, for me, it was all just as well. By May 1979, I was the proud owner of an official New York state driver’s license. This was a great birthday present I gave myself and a huge step toward becoming a fully documented, and legal, US resident. After seven months of living in the shadows, I at least now had something that established me as a resident of New York City.

  Step 3 of the process, obtaining a Social Security card, was the task I dreaded most because it required an in-person appearance at a Social Security office. I had no idea what to expect, so I prepared meticulously, with special focus on developing a plausible answer for why a thirty-four-year-old man didn’t already have a Social Security card.

  Though, in 1979, it was unusual for someone my age not to have a Social Security card, it was not inconceivable. Two groups were outside the jurisdiction of the Social Security Administration: employees of religious organizations and farm workers. The Center and I had chosen the farm option and consequently weaved it into my legend.

  Two weeks before my appointment, I spent at least two hours every day rehearsing my cover story ad nauseam. I also practiced answers to possible interview questions out loud in a secluded section of Inwood Hill Park in the northern section of Manhattan.

  On the day of the interview, I dressed in sandals, old jeans, and a slightly smudged T-shirt. I took other measures to create the impression of an ex-farmhand who had only recently arrived in the big city—I hadn’t shaved for three days, and I didn’t wash my hair that morning.

  On the table in my hotel room, I had a houseplant and a bottle with motor oil. I ground my fingertips into the soil until my nails were filled with dirt. Then I used a rag to stain my hands with motor oil.

  In the bathroom, I studied my face in the mirror and did not see a former farmworker. To remove the sharpness from my eyes, I rubbed them with soapy water until I could no longer stand the stinging pain. The red-eyed, unkempt, and unshaven face that now stared back at me gave me confidence that I had a good chance of pulling this off.

  In fact, the ruse exceeded my wildest expectations. At the Social Security office, the nondescript middle-aged interviewer asked me four questions, to which I gave short, monotone answers.

  “How is it that you don’t have a Social Security card?”

  “Never needed one.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Just never did.”

  “Have you worked before?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Where?”

  “On a farm upstate.”

  APPROVED.

  I was very proud of myself that day. I had overcome my fear and played my script to perfection.

  Now I had a Social Security card.

  Next up, an American passport.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, I had told the Center via secret writing that I was running out of money. Three weeks later, they informed me in one of their routine weekly shortwave radiograms of a proposed dead-drop operation on a Sunday in April. When I decrypted the code, the details regarding place and time emerged. The site was in Kissena Park in Flushing.

  The week before the planned operation, I went to that part of Queens to find the site and identify the two signal spots. I had no problem finding the drop site, but I was terribly disappointed with the location. Eugen would have given this one an F. It was right out in the open, in a park where there was certain to be a lot of foot traffic on a Sunday in April.

  It was too late to call
off the operation, and I really did need the money, so I made plans to follow through on schedule.

  On the following Sunday, I left the hotel at 11:00 a.m, armed with a black plastic shopping bag and a piece of white chalk. The first order of the day was to check for surveillance.

  From the hotel, I took the subway to Times Square, checked out the movie displays, walked to Macy’s, went up the escalator, checked out the goods on display, turned around, went down the elevator, changed my mind, and went back up. Then I left the store, took a crosstown bus to Grand Central Station, bought a train ticket for later, walked to Saks Fifth Avenue, went up the elevator and down the escalator, then up the escalator and down the elevator. Next, I took a train to 86th Street and followed the same routine inside Gimbel’s. This went on and on, for three hours, until I had determined that nobody was following me.

  At about two o’clock, I boarded the #7 train to Flushing. I reached the Flushing Main Street station early, so I had a quick snack at a Chinese restaurant to kill time. At exactly 3:05 p.m, I began my purposeful walk toward the signal site near Kissena Park. At exactly 3:15, I saw a vertical chalk mark on a lamp pole. The container had been placed. Within two minutes, I was at the drop site where the container was supposed to be.

  Because the whole area was out in the open, I was very nervous. I had completed my own surveillance detection, but what if the resident agent had been followed and didn’t know it? What if the FBI was lurking somewhere nearby, armed with a camera to catch me in the act?

  From a distance, I spotted the dented oilcan lying next to a drainage grate at the edge of the park. For the last fifty steps, my legs felt as if they were filled with lead. I finally reached the drop site, looked around briefly, and snatched up the container, dropping it quickly into the plastic bag.

  Before returning to the hotel, I surveyed the park and made my way to another lamppost. Leaning over casually, I struck the pole with the chalk, making a horizontal line to indicate that I had retrieved the container. Then I wasted no time leaving the area.

  Back at the hotel, I pulled out the oilcan and turned it over, trying to figure out how to open it. The agent had done a great job of securing the goods inside the can. Finally, I used a knife to pry off the lid of the can and found three more layers of packing inside: a wire mesh, duct tape, and a clear plastic bag. After a half hour of poking, prying, and cutting with a pair of scissors, I finally succeeded in extricating the prize: a neatly pressed stack of freshly printed one hundred dollar bills, totaling a whopping $10,000.

  After putting four hundred dollars into my wallet, I attached the remainder to the back of the refrigerator with a magnet, a spot that the cleaning staff was unlikely to ever go near.

  Eleven months had now passed since my arrival, and I still had no idea what kind of work I might be able to find. I had no job history in the US, no marketable manual skills, and Albrecht Dittrich’s academic credentials were of no use to Jack Barsky.

  For months, I studied the want ads in several newspapers. I also researched the two jobs the Center had suggested: longshoreman or taxi driver. Neither one seemed a viable option for me. Longshoremen belonged to an exclusive union that typically admitted only the well-connected into their ranks. Taxi drivers had to work long hours to make a living, and the frequent stories in the news about cabbies being robbed and assaulted by street thugs convinced me to reject this option. I finally concluded that the only unskilled job that was readily available to someone like me was that of a messenger working for minimum wage.

  Early one Monday morning, in August 1979, with a newspaper ad in hand, I showed up at the offices of Swift Messenger Service on West 46th Street, a midtown location between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The office was a storefront with a picture window facing the street. A dispatcher sat behind a desk at the back, and a few colorful characters were seated on wooden benches that lined the two side walls of the room.

  Though it was barely 9:00 a.m, the place was already busy. As I walked up to the desk, people were constantly coming and going—picking up packages and dropping them off.

  When I reached the desk, I waited for the dispatcher to have a free moment.

  “Good morning,” I said when my turn came. “I read your ad in yesterday’s Daily News.” I waved the newspaper to punctuate my statement.

  The man looked me up and down and paused for a moment.

  “Do you have a bike?” he asked.

  “I can get one.”

  “Okay then, show up tomorrow at 8:30 sharp with your bike and a shoulder bag. And don’t forget to bring one of those Kryptonite U-locks—bikes get stolen all the time. Oh, by the way, my name is Jay, and I’m the chief dispatcher here. See you tomorrow.”

  As I walked out of the office, I was still pondering the situation. During my wanderings around Manhattan, I had often noticed the antics of some of the cyclists in city traffic. They rode on sidewalks, weaved in and out of traffic, and traveled the wrong way on one-way streets, all the while frantically blowing on whistles to announce their presence.

  This was going to be one heck of a dangerous job!

  I wondered if I could really do it. Even more to the point, should I do it? Should I risk life and limb and my assignment? I remembered the first time I had ridden a bike as a young boy and how I had plowed into a neighbor who had once referred to me as an awkward sad sack. He had become a victim of his own prophecy.

  But they say that riding a bike is a skill one never forgets, and in the absence of a reasonable alternative for employment, I decided to give it a try. I found a bike shop on Eighth Avenue and bought a brand-new black ten-speed, a U-Lock, a whistle, and a messenger’s shoulder bag, for a grand total of $155.

  The next morning, I took my bike down the elevator and very cautiously began my first bike ride in the big city, down Broadway to 46th Street and across town to the Swift office.

  When I arrived shortly before 8:30, Jay seemed genuinely happy to see me.

  “Let me tell you how this works—it’s not brain surgery.” He rose from the desk and pointed to a table full of packages. Each package had a rectangular piece of paper on top. Jay removed one of these slips and said, “This here is a ticket. Every package has a ticket associated with it. There are three sections: customer information, pickup address, and delivery address. We fill out all the tickets here in the office. All you need to do is get a signature from the person you deliver the package to.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” I said eagerly.

  But Jay wasn’t finished yet. “When I started in this job, I changed things to make us more efficient. Most of our customers are right in this area, so I have foot messengers pick up the packages, assemble them in groups by delivery area, and then we give them to the bike guys to deliver. This is much faster than our competitors’ one-off method, and it’s also good for you—you get to do more deliveries. We pay you a 50 percent commission, which at current rates is $1.75 per ticket.”

  I perked up. A dollar-seventy-five per delivery? This could be good! In 1979, the minimum wage was $2.90 an hour, and I figured I could easily average more than two deliveries an hour making local drops around town.

  “Finally,” Jay said, “we need a bike man at our 52nd Street office. I’ll give Al a call to tell him you’re going to be over there shortly. Here’s the address.” He handed me a slip of paper, and I was on my way.

  Because I didn’t want to break the law on my very first day by going against traffic, I walked my bike over to Sixth Avenue and rode to the 52nd Street office, just off Madison Avenue.

  When I walked in the door, a slim African American man, with glistening jet-black hair combed straight back, was barking out orders to the messengers. I soon learned that Al, the chief dispatcher, was a kind and patient man behind his harsh and strident demeanor. But it required a certain toughness to manage the variety of shady characters who worked as messengers, several of whom were only a step away from the gutter.

  “You must be Jack,” Al said as s
oon as he saw me. “We desperately need a bike man. Our last guy, Pete, did not show up today, and he did not call. Probably drugs—I saw this coming. There’s just too much turnover with these bike guys.”

  Al looked me over and asked, “How well do you know Manhattan?”

  “Very well,” I answered truthfully. After all, I had explored almost the entire island on foot.

  “We shall see.” Al pointed to a pile of six packages and letters and said, “These are all for the Upper West Side. Deliver them and come straight back.”

  I stowed my freight in the messenger bag, threw it over my left shoulder, and joined the hustle and bustle of Manhattan traffic on my very first day of work as Jack Barsky, the American.

  It being my first day, I rode very carefully, and it took me two hours to deliver all six packages. Still, when I returned to the office around noon, Al seemed pleased.

  “Not bad. Here’s another pile—these are all East Side.”

  By now it was lunchtime, and I was hungry and thirsty under the hot Manhattan sun. But stopping for an hour to eat and rest seemed like a bad idea. After all, there was work to be done and money to be made. So I worked right through the hunger, as I would for my entire time as a bike messenger.

  At the end of the day, I counted eighteen tickets with my name on them. When I did the math, I turned a mental somersault. Eighteen times $1.75, and working five days a week, meant I’d make $157.50 a week. That was more than a dollar an hour above minimum wage.

  I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. This was a livable wage, and with that income to supplement my stash from the Center, I would be able to rent an apartment and finally get out of that dreadful hotel.

  When I arrived at the hotel that night, I was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and tired. But I was anything but miserable. I kicked off my shoes and tossed my empty messenger bag on the table, feeling ecstatic after my first day on the job.

  After a month as a messenger, and with four paychecks deposited into a brand-new bank account, I started looking for an apartment. Like others who hailed from out of town and “had just jumped off a potato truck” I fell for a classic New York City scam. The pied-à-terre studio apartment on the Upper East Side that was advertised in the Sunday section of the Daily News seemed like a perfect fit.