by Jack Barsky
One afternoon, as we were sitting on a bench in the garden, Gerlinde brought up the future.
“So, Albrecht, be honest, how long will you be gone?”
This was the kind of question that made me very uncomfortable. Deep inside, the mission came first, but I didn’t want to be too blunt about this.
“I should be back for another visit in two years, and I have been told that the entire assignment is likely to end after ten years. And then I will be all yours.”
I hesitated for a moment before adding the necessary disclaimer.
“Of course, you know how serious this is. I could also wind up in jail, in which case the future becomes very uncertain.”
“I understand,” Gerlinde said, “and I support you one hundred percent. For me, it is either you or nobody. But I would love to have a child with you.”
I was surprised but also happy that she felt this way. “But would you be okay with raising a child without the father present?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said with determination, as if she had already thought it all through. “My parents would play an important role, and my brother is in Berlin now. I want something of you with me while you’re gone.”
We agreed that having a child together would be wonderful, and I think she hoped it might actually happen during this short time we had together.
A week or so later, we returned to Berlin, and on September 27, 1980, we were married in a civil ceremony in Prenzlauer Berg. Gerlinde’s younger brother was the only witness. The next day, I threw a few belongings into my suitcase, removed the wedding band from my finger, and said good-bye to Gerlinde for another two years.
“You know I’m doing this for a very important cause,” I said. “We just need to be patient.”
Gerlinde had tears in her eyes, but they betrayed sadness, not despair. We both believed that one day we would no longer have to say good-bye.
By the time I returned to Moscow, the key decision for my future had been made. As a well-trained and somewhat battle-tested agent, fluent in American English, I could have been given any number of short- or medium-term assignments. But, as I expected, the foundation I had established in New York City was deemed too valuable to discard, even though the timeline before any useful intelligence could be gathered would be much longer than originally planned.
The Center had decided that I should get an American college degree, in order to establish myself in a profession where I might be more likely to make valuable contacts.
“Columbia University would be a good place to study,” Alex said.
“Sure,” I said. “But how do we establish my credentials? A high school dropout bike messenger doesn’t just walk into an Ivy League education.”
“Yes, you are right, of course,” Alex said with a moan. “I just allowed myself to dream for a moment. Let’s shoot for a degree in economics from the City University then. While you are there, you should get to know and report on as many students as you can. They may become the decision makers of the future. The earlier they are recruited the better.”
With that decision fleshed out in more detail, my last two days in Moscow were filled with the drudgery of prewriting letters to my mother and brother, and the customary send-off banquet.
I returned to New York through Vienna and Chicago. As soon as I arrived at my apartment in Queens, I destroyed my travel passport and retrieved my American documents from their hiding place. With memories of Germany and Gerlinde locked tightly away in the most remote section of my brain, Jack Barsky reported for duty as a bike messenger the following morning.
ONE SATURDAY IN LATE NOVEMBER, I went to my favorite hangout, the TGI Friday’s at 75th and Broadway, a holdover from my days living on the West Side of Manhattan. I was sipping a drink and smoking a cigarette while gazing idly at the mirrored wall behind the bar when suddenly my eyes caught the reflection of a beautiful woman, who was seated immediately to my right and appeared to be looking straight at me. I turned and smiled, and soon we were engaged in a lively conversation.
Luz Maria was a great conversationalist, and I found her mild Spanish accent extraordinarily charming. She said she was in New York with her mother for some shopping and entertainment. She pointed to a well-dressed, dark-haired woman who was seated on the other side of her and talking very intensely to someone else.
“What country are you from?” I asked. I had to start with something.
“Well, originally we are from Chile. But when the country was caught in the struggle between Allende and Pinochet, we left. I wound up in Spain, and my mother lives with her husband in Washington, DC.”
She leaned over and whispered with innocent, girlish charm into my ear. “He’s Belgian and a little weird. I don’t like him much at all.”
The spy in me took note of Luz Maria’s leftward leanings and her mother’s apparent wealth. They were staying at a very expensive hotel on Central Park South.
At that point, her mother interrupted our conversation. Apparently, they were about to meet someone at the hotel. But before she left, Luz Maria paused for a moment and said, “Why don’t you join us tomorrow night for dinner? Say around seven?”
I was delighted to accept.
The next evening, I joined Luz Maria, her mother, and a young Filipino musical genius named Glenn Sales, whose training as a pianist in the US was being sponsored by Luz’s mother. The conversation around the table was delightful, and too soon it was time to say good-bye. At that moment I felt as if we were leaving a huge loose end floating in the air.
At the beginning of December, the Center informed me via shortwave transmission that Gerlinde had gotten her wish and was now pregnant. I was thrilled, but I had no one to share the news with. I was going to be a father, but like everything else in the life of Albrecht Dittrich, I had to keep it all locked inside.
The first six months of 1981 passed uneventfully until June 25, which was a Thursday, the night of my weekly radio transmission from the Center. At the end of a forty-five minute decryption process to decode the latest instructions from Moscow, my eyes widened as the final message emerged letter by letter: CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BIRTH OF YOUR SON, MATTHIAS, BORN 17 JUNE. MOTHER AND CHILD IN GOOD HEALTH.
I jumped up from my chair and turned two consecutive somersaults on the carpet in the hallway. What Gerlinde and I had only dared to dream about in September had actually happened. I was so excited that I almost forgot to destroy the paper with the message.
I needed to let Gerlinde know how happy I was, and I decided to take extraordinary measures. On certain occasions, I had so much information to transmit that there was not enough space in a letter or even two. In those cases, I would write out the message, photograph the sheets of paper, and pass along the exposed, but undeveloped, film cartridge via a dead-drop operation. I had recently prepared a lengthy update about the political climate in America and had also identified three new dead-drop sites, which I needed to describe. At the end of my report, I included a congratulatory note and a sweet love letter to Gerlinde.
With that done, I locked up the Albrecht drawer in my brain and slipped back fully into the persona of Jack Barsky.
Two months later, Luz Maria came to Washington, DC, for a visit. She called and invited me to a black-tie musical soiree at her mother’s house, given in honor of the Austrian cultural attaché and featuring Glenn Sales.
I had three days to acquire an appropriate outfit. Instead of renting a tuxedo, I went to Barneys, one of the finest outfitters in New York City. This time, I knew what to buy—no more checkered “American” pants. Instead, I chose a pin-striped, navy blue Armani suit. The suit with a double-breasted jacket, a white dress shirt, a light blue tie, and cuff links, set me back about $750. But for that one evening, it was worth it. I never looked better.
On Saturday morning, I took the Eastern Air Lines shuttle to Washington National Airport and checked into a hotel not far from the US Capitol.
When I arrived at Luz’s mother’s colonia
l-style house in the suburbs of Washington, DC, I caught a glimpse of the marvelous lifestyle of the American upper class. Each room was painted in a different rich, royal color. Chair rails, ornate crown moldings, strategically placed old-style paintings, and handcrafted antique furniture created an atmosphere I had previously experienced only in museums and century-old castles. As soon as I entered the living room, my eyes were drawn to a magnificent ebony grand piano.
As Glenn Sales took his place at the keyboard and played a number of pieces by various romantic composers, it all felt like pure magic.
With time, I became more comfortable and was even able to exchange some pleasantries—in English—with the Austrian guest of honor, and I realized that I could fit in with this crowd! When people asked me about my profession, I told them I was an independent accountant, a lie I could not have sustained for any length of time.
When the evening was done, I was forced to walk away from a great opportunity to connect with a group of people who might ultimately have yielded some interesting results for my comrades in Moscow. It wasn’t time yet, even though the thought of mingling with the diplomatic crowd in the nation’s capital made my mouth water. But as a bike messenger? Forget it!
I returned to New York on Sunday evening, and the next morning I put on my yellow rain suit and mounted my bike for another wet day on the streets of Manhattan—painfully aware of the chasm between my fairy-tale weekend and the grimy reality of the workweek.
When Luz Maria had told me of her plans to move to the United States within a year, my pulse rate accelerated. Although I wasn’t thinking of the long-term consequences of her being in America, I was content to think that I would at least see her again.
I decided I would try to surprise her the next time we met, so I spent the next several months studying Spanish, with the same dedication I had devoted to learning English. Within the year, my command of the language was good enough that I could read Spanish language novels, including the linguistically complex Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez.
A few months after the Washington, DC, soirée, I found a letter in the mail from Luz Maria. I opened it quickly and paced the floor while reading her words. She had met someone in Spain and now planned to stay with him in anticipation of marriage. She thanked me for our time together and wished me well.
I sat at the table and read the letter again. Though somewhat abashed for all the months I had spent studying Spanish, I also felt relieved. Jack Barsky needed to remain focused, and a beautiful woman could be my downfall.
I HAD NOT LOST SIGHT of the primary task ahead of me: earning a college degree. My research convinced me that the only viable options were public schools. Their open admission policy guaranteed that somebody with only a high school equivalency diploma would be accepted. (I had taken the GED test and received my certificate in December 1979.) Public colleges also had reasonable tuition, making them affordable even to a lowly bike messenger.
In preparation for my enrollment, I earned twenty credits via the federal College Level Examination Program. The goal was for me to finish my degree as quickly as possible so that I could join the professional ranks while I was still young enough to be hired. I was accepted at Baruch College, a part of the City University of New York, and showed up for my first day of class in September 1981.
In order to maintain my financial cover, I continued my job as a messenger. I took classes in the morning and reported for bike duty in the afternoon. With this demanding schedule, my ability to socialize outside of school or engage in intelligence-gathering activities was reduced to a bare minimum.
It was a strange feeling to return to academia as a freshman after leaving eight years earlier as a professor. The average student at Baruch was about a dozen years my junior, but I began to develop friendships with some of my classmates—including a set of identical triplets who had been separated at birth and had found each other by accident at the age of nineteen. They were now enrolled together at Baruch.
Another new friendship was with a remarkable young immigrant from Hong Kong, with whom I shared at least one thing in common: We both had a laser-like focus on becoming successful in American society.
In calculus, he and I competed for the best grades, and our contest ended in a tie when we both scored 99 percent. But if you consider that I had taught calculus at the college level ten years earlier, you might say my friend was the true winner.
I also remember sitting next to him in political science and noticing how many passages he had highlighted in yellow in his textbook. When I told him that by highlighting so much of the page he was essentially highlighting nothing, his response was astounding: “Those are all the words I don’t understand.”
I could relate well to his challenge, and I volunteered to help him soften his accent by leading him through some phonetic exercises similar to the ones I had used when studying English in Moscow.
Not surprisingly, my friend went on to study at Columbia Law School and became a member of the Columbia Law Review in his first semester, so he was well on his way to making an impact on the world. When I met him again years later, he told me that he had chosen me as the subject for one of the essays required for his application to Columbia. I never saw the essay, but it wasn’t hard to guess that its main thrust was how an American had welcomed this Chinese newcomer to his country with open arms. The irony, for me, was delicious.
While walking between classes one day in early 1982, I saw a bulletin board notice for a current affairs group meeting, and I signed up immediately.
Led by history professor Selma Berrol, the group of about twenty students met on Wednesdays at lunchtime to discuss current world affairs and American politics. For purposes of these discussions, I positioned myself on the left of the political spectrum, with some sympathy for the Western European brand of socialism, but firmly anti-Communist.
Over the next couple of years, this group provided great insight for my reports to the Center about the mood of the country—particularly in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by a Soviet fighter jet reignited tensions between the US and the Soviet Union that had largely diminished during the period of détente in the 1970s. There was widespread concern in our group that Reagan might push the world to the brink of nuclear war with his aggressive approach to international diplomacy.
Only one person in the group, a guy named Fred, sided with Reagan. Fred was ultraconservative, and the rest of us would chuckle or roll our eyes when he started on one of his rants.
“I’m telling you, the Russians are deathly afraid of Ronald Reagan. We need to show them that we are serious. Historically, appeasement has never worked, and it will not work today. And if the Russians try to keep up with us in this race, they will simply go bankrupt.”
In his own way, Fred actually expressed historical truth before it became evident.
During my years at Baruch I sent profiles of about twenty students to the Center. Those profiles included basic personal data such as their name, address, contact information, physical description, character traits, political leanings, and possible angles for recruitment. The Center was always on the lookout for sources of secret information.
There was quite a variety of recruitment angles: money, addictions, information that would make a person vulnerable to extortion, and radical political leanings, left or right. From that perspective, Fred was a promising lead. Many a right-wing radical had given information to the Soviets under a “false flag,” thinking they were working with a Western ally, such as Israel, when in fact their contact was a KGB operative.
In the summer of 1982, after one full year of college, my two-year stint was up again. It was time for a second return trip to debrief in Moscow and see Gerlinde in Berlin. I couldn’t wait to finally meet my son, who was now a year old.
The stopover prior to Moscow was in Rome. When I arrived there, I m
ade contact with the resident agent to exchange passports and then went to a travel agency to book my flight to Russia on Aeroflot.
“I’m sorry,” the travel agent told me in English. “There is a baggage handlers strike and all Aeroflot flights have been canceled until further notice. She pointed out that Alitalia still had flights going to Moscow.
I paused to think about this alternative. I had been instructed to always use Aeroflot in and out of Moscow. I decided to wait a few days.
To relieve my anxiety, I forced myself out of the hotel, but I was not in the mood for tourism. All I wanted to do was see my wife and son, and every day in Rome stole a day from my time in Berlin. I had to be back in New York in time for the start of the fall semester.
After five days of waiting, and no end in sight for the strike, I decided I was entitled to break the rule. I booked a flight on Alitalia, set the “departed country” sign, and flew to Moscow.
When I got off the plane, Mikhail was waiting for me, and he was visibly upset.
“You should not have done that,” he said. “The passport you just used is now worthless. Do you know how much time and effort it takes to create a working passport?”
I apologized profusely but said, “I had to improvise. I only have a five-week window before reporting back to college, and I’ve already lost a week.”
Mikhail accepted my apology but added sternly, “I want to be very clear. From now on, you will follow our travel instructions to the letter.”
It was the only time Mikhail ever spoke to me in that manner, and it was a warning to remember.
After my customary three-day debriefing session, I flew to Berlin, where Sergej was waiting for me at the airport. He put me to shame by giving me a big plush teddy bear as a present for Matthias, something I had not thought about.