Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  After touring the marvelous apartment, I asked again if the advertised rent was correct. It seemed too affordable. My excitement grew when the agent confirmed the price. I had to have this place. It was the first slice of the good life in America, and it finally seemed to be within reach. In fact, it was almost too good to be true.

  “This place will go fast,” the agent said. “I’ve already shown it to a few people who are trying to get it. But a $300 cash deposit will lock it in for you.”

  I told him I had to get the money from the bank, and I hurried to my hotel room to retrieve the cash from my “bank,” the hiding place behind the fridge. I then rushed back uptown and handed over three freshly minted hundred dollar bills to make sure that no one else would beat me to the prize.

  The next day, when I tried reaching the agency by phone, I couldn’t make a connection. When I went to the place the following weekend, it was empty. A few weeks later, the mystery was solved when I saw a local TV report about a group of scam artists who had used the very same apartment to collect thousands of dollars in cash “deposits” from gullible victims. Because I had plenty of cash reserves, the $300 loss didn’t hurt me as much as missing out on that apartment. I chalked it up to inexperience and learned a valuable lesson about capitalism: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

  After searching for an apartment for weeks, I finally came to terms with the reality that Manhattan was not an option for me. To expand my search, I randomly picked a subway line—the #7 train, which connects Times Square with Flushing, Queens—and got off in Woodside at the 61st Street express station.

  In the early 1980s, that section of Queens was a safe and clean lower-middle-class neighborhood in the midst of a transition from Irish/German to multiethnic. The real estate agent, who was just around the corner from the train station, wasted no time in showing me exactly what I was looking for—a small, fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in a four-family house on 39th Avenue, a five-minute walk from the subway station.

  The landlord, an immigrant from Colombia, lived in one of the upstairs apartments with his wife and mother. My apartment was on the ground floor in the back, with windows facing a fenced-in yard. The dinette adjacent to the small kitchen was shielded completely from the window, providing me with a safe space where I could conduct my intelligence-related activities without having to worry about prying eyes from the outside.

  Leaving the seedy hotel on the West Side and moving into an apartment was another big milestone in my efforts to fully establish myself in the United States. Not only was I joining the mainstream, with a steady income and a place of my own to live, but I was also able to enjoy some creature comforts.

  So, how does a German starved for a home-cooked meal celebrate after moving into his first apartment in the US? Boiled potatoes, sausages, and butter. There was still a bit of homesickness in me after all.

  The Center congratulated me on my achievements and advised me to continue in the bike messenger job for another nine months before embarking on the final step of my legalization—applying for a passport. Nine more months would take me right on through winter and up until the next summer—which meant the full gamut of New York weather. As satisfying as a good day on the bike could be, my handlers in the KGB did not quite understand how demanding, and sometimes even demeaning, this job was.

  On a typical weekday, my alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. On days when it was raining or snowing, I really did not want to get up. But I would remind myself that if I didn’t show up in bad weather, they might not want me back when the sun came out. Besides, it was important to build a consistent work history so that whatever came next in the evolution of my undercover role, I could show potential employers that I could hold a job.

  After hastily eating my cereal, I would layer on my work clothes for rainy weather: jeans, a flannel shirt, nylon jacket, rubber boots, and the final layer of protection: a yellow rubber rain suit, with pants and a jacket.

  Next, I’d sling the waterproof messenger bag over my shoulder, roll my bike into the street, and climb awkwardly onto the saddle. The twenty-minute ride to Manhattan would take at least thirty minutes on those days, and the driving rain often hit me right in the face.

  Al always gave me a great route, but even six deliveries in this weather would take me all morning. And though most people were happy to receive their packages, they were not necessarily happy to see me, dripping wet, step into their office or their home.

  I’ll never forget the time I was picking up an envelope at Ronald Lauder’s residence on Park Avenue to deliver to the Estée Lauder offices on Fifth Avenue. When I stepped off the elevator, I was dazzled by all the pastel colors and the white carpet. That is, until the receptionist shrieked, “Do not come in here!”

  She hurried over and very carefully removed the envelope from my outstretched, dripping hand, trying to avoid any contact with the dirty man from the street.

  On another occasion, when I was making a delivery in the Garment district, the young receptionist who saw me walk in turned around and yelled to the back, “Christine, the messenger boy is here.”

  I wanted to scream, Lady, you don’t have a clue who you just called a messenger boy!

  Right then, I really yearned to be back in Germany, standing in a warm, dry lecture hall, teaching chemistry or math—or anything, for that matter. This spy stuff was not living up to its marquee billing.

  Occasionally, a special package made the job more interesting. In addition to several pickups and deliveries at Ronald Lauder’s luxurious home, I once took some carpet samples to the residence of Jacqueline Onassis. On another occasion, I made a lunch delivery from the famous Russian Tea Room to Dustin Hoffman’s hospital room. (The Tea Room was Hoffman’s favorite restaurant, but they didn’t deliver.) But for all my time as a bike messenger, that’s as close as I got to moving and shaking with the upper crust of American society.

  Even though the messenger job wasn’t exactly a great platform from which to conduct intelligence work, hanging out with the motley crew at the messenger office allowed me to gradually and safely integrate into American culture. The office was a safe haven where I was in the company of men at the fringes of society, who had no interest in finding out who I was, where I’d come from, or where I was going.

  Despite my careful and defensive approach to New York traffic, I could not escape the fate of every bike messenger who works the job for any length of time: accidents.

  I was involved in two serious accidents, and the first one almost ended my undercover operation altogether. In that instance, I crashed into a deep pothole in the middle of Madison Avenue, totaling my bike and escaping by inches from being run over by a truck.

  The second accident was not life-threatening, but it had more serious, long-term consequences. I was sailing through an intersection on a green light when a beat-up old Buick made a left turn without looking for oncoming traffic. I crashed hard and immediately felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder.

  After the police arrived and laid the blame squarely on the driver, I locked up my damaged bike and walked to the emergency room at nearby Cabrini Medical Center. The diagnosis was a dislocated right clavicle, as well as damaged ligaments and muscles at the back of my shoulder. Because I had no medical insurance, the doctor advised against expensive surgery of the kind that would typically be done only on high-performance athletes. He immobilized my right arm with a sling and advised me that I was likely to contract arthritis in that permanently dislocated joint later in life.

  As I walked out of the hospital, still dazed from the experience, I had the sudden urge to light up a cigarette. So after six months of hard-fought abstinence, I joined the ranks of backslidden smokers.

  For the next three weeks, I could not ride a bicycle, and being right-handed, I could not communicate with the Center through secret writing. Once I was able to explain the reason for my silence, it established a precedent for the comrades at the Center and helped them understand t
hat there would be times when I would be nonresponsive for a valid reason. This unplanned silence, and the subsequent trust generated by the explanation, would later help me in ways I could not have imagined at the time.

  ON A SUNNY MONDAY in the middle of June 1980, I was on my way to Manhattan via subway. I had taken the day off to take care of “a personal matter.” That personal matter was the quest for the crown jewel of my American documentation: a genuine US passport.

  This application was critically important to my future, and I followed the instructions from Moscow to a tee. We had practiced filling out the application to make sure I wouldn’t make an inadvertent mistake.

  As instructed, I went to the New York passport agency in Rockefeller Center armed with a completed application, two passport pictures, my driver’s license, and the Jack Barsky birth certificate. There were others ahead of me in line, so I took my place at the end and waited.

  I felt relaxed, thinking that this process would be a mere formality, a piece of cake. After all, I had two other foundational documents that established my identity as Jack Barsky.

  After waiting for fifteen minutes, I was waved over by one of the agents, a balding, bespectacled, middle-aged bureaucrat.

  “Good morning,” he said in a perfunctory tone.

  “Good morning,” I replied casually. By now I was familiar with how to respond in such situations.

  I handed over my documents and the pictures and took a half step to the side, waiting patiently while the agent perused my application. It seemed he was taking a long time going over the paperwork. Finally, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. As he handed it to me, he said matter-of-factly, “There are some questions concerning your identity. Please fill out this supplementary questionnaire and come back to me.”

  I was stunned, but I managed to react with a natural-sounding response. “Do I have to go back to the end of the line?”

  “No,” he answered politely. “You may come straight to my window.”

  I withdrew to the back of the large room and started filling out the questionnaire: name, address, birth date and place . . . and then I read, “What is the name of the high school you attended?”

  I immediately knew that it made no sense to read any further. Any answers I might concoct could not be verified, and handing in the questionnaire with bogus answers to a government official could easily trigger a more thorough investigation.

  I had to act quickly and decisively. Without giving it much thought, I strode briskly back to the agent’s window, planted myself next to the woman to whom the agent was now speaking, and blurted out with feigned indignity, “I don’t need to deal with this BS.”

  Reaching across the counter, I grabbed my documents and pictures, which the agent had set off to the side, and walked out of the office as quickly as I could. As I hurriedly descended the stairs to the ground floor, I was half expecting a security guard to try to stop me. Once I reached the street, I blended in with the tourist crowd in Rockefeller Plaza and made my way back to the subway.

  As I walked south on Fifth Avenue, I realized I had escaped a dangerous situation by the skin of my teeth. But this was clearly not a moment of pride and triumph. This was the most important assignment I’d been given to make me fully American and launch me into the life of a rich capitalist who could do some real damage to the enemy, and I had just failed the final exam.

  I went back to my apartment and drowned my sorrows in a bottle of wine.

  The following Saturday, I reported the event in a secret letter to the Center and asked to make arrangements for the planned trip back to the Center and to East Germany.

  The passport debacle had a lasting effect on me. For the first time in almost two years, I felt deeply lonely. The shock of my failure unlocked a back door into my heart, and the cold, unfeeling Jack gave way to the German Albrecht, who desperately wanted to be home among friends and reunited with the woman he loved.

  The two months I had to wait before the trip could be arranged felt like another two years.

  Finally, in the middle of August, I received travel money and a passport via a dead drop. I told my boss at the messenger office that I wanted to take a rather lengthy vacation. I had no idea if I would ever see him again.

  About a week prior to my planned departure, I went on a shopping trip in Manhattan and spent some of my hard-earned messenger money on expensive gifts for Gerlinde—a pearl necklace, a pair of wedding bands, and several articles of clothing acquired at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue. With respect to consumer goods, I had developed the same contradictory attitude as most of my KGB colleagues who had exposure to the West. We all loved and desired the products of the system we were working hard to destroy.

  Just before leaving my apartment en route to LaGuardia Airport, I retrieved the fake passport from its hiding place and left my American documents hidden in my apartment. Thus began my circuitous trip to Berlin, via Chicago, Vienna, and Moscow. As soon as I fastened my seat belt on the plane to Chicago, my stress level diminished greatly. Albrecht Dittrich was going home.

  When I reached Vienna, it felt like I was already home again. It was such a relief to speak in my native language for the first time in more than two years.

  I set the signal indicating my arrival and went to the meeting place the next afternoon.

  This time, the recognition protocol proved to be unnecessary. To my surprise, my contact was a young agent named Arkadi, whom I had met a couple of times in Moscow. I didn’t know quite how to respond when I saw this old comrade, so I waited for his cue.

  “Hello, Dieter. It’s good to see you again,” he said warmly. “Let’s go have a cup of coffee.”

  Apparently, he was not worried about being followed by Western intelligence agents, because we sat down at a nearby café for coffee and a piece of Black Forest cake. It was delicious.

  Between bites, Arkadi said, “The comrades at the Center are eagerly awaiting your return, and Gerlinde is waiting in Berlin.”

  For those few words, I would have gladly given up all the cake and coffee in the world!

  Arkadi then told me that Sergej had been transferred to Berlin, but that another agent would pick me up at the airport. After giving me detailed instructions for the flight to Moscow, he stood up to leave. As he stepped away from the table, he swept up the newspaper I had been carrying, which contained the passport I had traveled on. After he was gone, I pocketed the manila envelope he had left on the tabletop, which held my passport and new identity for the trip to Russia.

  As the Aeroflot plane made its final approach into Moscow and I recognized the strip of forest I had flown over several times before, my sense of anticipation grew. I was one step closer to home. My new handler, Mikhail, was waiting for me at the gate.

  We went to the apartment where I would be staying, and after a light meal he handed me the mail that had been sent by Gerlinde and my mother during my absence.

  I could not wait to read Gerlinde’s letters. As soon as Mikhail closed the door behind him, I devoured them one by one. When I was through, I read the letters from my mother, but with some reluctance. Every line she’d written was a poignant reminder that I was guilty of lying to her.

  For the next two days, I met with agents at the Center to fill them in on the details of the past two years. In spite of my failure to obtain a passport, my infiltration was declared a success because I had established a foothold in the United States and could still become an important asset to the KGB. We would discuss a new strategy for how to make use of my position after my vacation in East Germany.

  When I entered the arrival hall at Schönefeld Airport in Berlin, I immediately saw Sergej walking toward me with a giant grin on his face.

  “What’s this I hear about you working in Berlin now?” I said as he gave me a hard slap on the back.

  “Ja, my years of learning German finally paid off,” he said. “The work here is also more interesting, but you know we can’t talk abo
ut that.”

  “I understand you have maintained contact with Gerlinde. How is she?” I asked.

  “She’s a beautiful and brave woman. You are lucky to have somebody like that waiting for you at home.”

  Sergej smuggled me through customs, and we drove to my old apartment on Eitelstraße. Gerlinde was still at work, but I went over to her place on the chance that she might have left work early that day.

  After a full hour on the sidewalk in front of her house—pacing, sitting, waiting anxiously—I finally spotted her in the distance, elegant as ever in a black skirt and green leather jacket.

  When she saw me, she ran toward me as fast as her high heels would allow, and we fell into each other’s arms.

  “Albrecht, is it really you?”

  Inside her apartment, she talked happily about the details of her life in Berlin. She didn’t ask about my work, and I volunteered little. She knew this visit was only temporary and that it would still be a long time before we could truly start a life together.

  “I brought gifts,” I said with a great deal of pride and satisfaction. I unpacked the presents and laid them out in front of her. She gasped, and her face flushed with excitement when she saw the wedding bands.

  The next day, Sergej provided me with a “company car” and directions to a secluded Party retreat in southern Germany, about forty kilometers from the border of Czechoslovakia. There wasn’t much to do in the little town of Plauen, but for a young couple in love who had not seen each other for two years, sightseeing was not at the top of our to-do list. For the next two weeks, we enjoyed the wonderful home-cooked German food prepared by the resident caretakers and spent time in the garden or in our room reading and talking and getting reacquainted. Knowing that I would soon be back in New York, I wanted to soak up as much of my homeland and my beloved Gerlinde as I could.