by Jack Barsky
One day, I’ll be back for good, and then we can reignite the flame.
I also failed to gain much traction with Matthias. He had learned to call me “Vati,” but he probably didn’t know what that meant. He had no frame of reference. I played games with him that fathers of three-year-olds would play, but there were no hugs or kisses or other expressions of love. One day, after we had kicked the soccer ball for an hour, I sat down on a park bench and Matthias came up to me and nestled in my lap. This felt rather awkward to me, and I didn’t know how to respond. I was following in my father’s footsteps, and I didn’t know how to change it. With such a short time together, I felt there was nothing I could do.
Back in Moscow, Alex lectured me about the relationship between the US and the USSR. When he spoke about the role of President Reagan, his voice took on a sense of urgency.
“Albrecht, this is the first time since we tried to deploy the missiles to Cuba that the world is getting close to a nuclear exchange. The Reagan Doctrine is upsetting the balance that was guaranteed by the concept of mutually assured destruction. He’s playing with fire, and I tell you, this talk about the apocalyptic end times by some of the pastors of the churches Reagan and his followers are associated with scares the daylights out of me. What if Reagan thinks that he is an instrument of God and has the urge to push the button to start the final destruction of the planet? If at all possible, get close to somebody who has an understanding of Reagan’s mind.”
I found it interesting that the fears Alex expressed were just as Fred, the ultraconservative from the current affairs group at Baruch, had predicted. But Alex had no idea. Getting close to someone in the Reagan Administration, for a junior programmer at a New York insurance company, was a tall order indeed!
This fear of President Reagan stemmed from a fundamental lack of understanding of the American political system. First of all, the president of the United States is not the all-powerful strongman that so many Communist leaders in the Soviet Union assumed he was. Also, a better understanding of the Christian faith would have provided the Communists with some assurance that Reagan did not see himself as an instrument of God whose job it was to accelerate the coming of the end of the world. On the contrary, Reagan’s goal was to rid the world of the nuclear threat. It is my personal belief that the Russians’ irrational fear of President Reagan contributed significantly to the eventual fall of the Soviet Union—an event that was not yet foreseeable in 1984.
AFTER RETURNING TO THE US, I started my professional career on the first Tuesday of September 1984. The concept of “business casual” had not yet been adopted by the insurance industry. So, prior to my trip to Europe, I had bought three suits, half a dozen dress shirts and ties, and a pair of Bally shoes.
For a former bike messenger, who had not yet cashed his first paycheck, I was overdressed, but this was not enough of a misstep to raise the curiosity of my new bosses and coworkers.
The insurance industry was on the eve of a radical transformation, fueled by information technology and aided by automation. In the past, armies of claims adjusters, sitting behind desks in neatly arranged rows, had toiled away, analyzing, approving, or rejecting claims. Now they were about to be replaced by a much smaller number of knowledge workers who delegated the routine aspects of data processing to the computers.
When I joined the company, the floor layout still reflected the paper-based tradition. I shared a desk with a fellow named Felix, a middle-aged senior programmer with dark, curly hair and a sharp nose. To my surprise, he spoke with a Russian accent.
“Are you Russian?” I asked.
“No, I am Ukrainian, and I hate everything Russian.”
That was a strong answer, but very much reflective of the historic hostility between the two nations.
“So how do you like working here?” I asked.
Felix looked up from his stack of computer printouts and answered with a smirk. “Sometimes I feel like a slave. They work you hard, and when things go wrong at night, they have no problem waking you up. Get ready for a rough ride.”
He was certainly not a happy camper.
Later, I sat down in the terminal room to sign on to my account for the first time. The man to my right turned and smiled. “Hi, my name is Joe. Welcome to MetLife!”
Joe was a well-groomed, perfectly dressed gentleman. His black hair and dark eyes reflected his southern European ancestry, but he spoke without an accent.
After telling him my name, I repeated the question I’d asked Felix. “So what is it like to work here?”
“Oh, this is a great place. We’re working on the biggest medical claims system in the country, and we have all the resources needed to do a good job. And they treat us so well.”
“But what about the night calls?” I asked.
“That comes with the territory,” Joe responded with an ear-to-ear grin.
Joe turned out to be of Sicilian descent. He and Felix were among quite a number of immigrants and first-generation Americans on the team of about fifty information technology professionals—a reflection that computer work was the fastest avenue to success for smart people from other parts of the world.
There was Gerard, a Cuban, and one of the smartest individuals I’ve ever met; Savely, an equally smart Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union; Olga, a former Russian schoolteacher; Bob, a highly capable immigrant from Hong Kong; Rufus, from the small island of Saint Kitts in the Caribbean; and José, a Spaniard who was as smart as he was droll. And then, of course, there was an East German Soviet spy masquerading as a full-blooded American. The only real American in the gang I socialized with was Patrick, who is still a good friend today.
One day, I was sitting next to Joe, typing some computer commands into the mainframe, when the far door was flung open and a short fellow with disheveled hair and wire-frame glasses walked in. He picked up an ashtray full of butts, threw it on the floor with a curse, and stormed back out.
“Who was that?” I asked Joe.
“Don’t mind him. That’s just Ron, acting out. He is a bit odd, but boy, his code is out of this world.”
This was my kind of crowd—intelligent, full of energy, and just a little odd. The terminal room, where we had access to the mainframe, had an atmosphere of camaraderie, and friendly insults flew back and forth to break the tension. On my second day, Joe looked at me, smiled, and said, “That’s a very nice tie you have on. How many polyesters gave their lives to make that one?”
I quickly embraced the culture and soon was able to trade insults with the best of them. Within six months, I had mastered the learning curve and was able to produce functioning programs. I loved the opportunity to create something from nothing by stringing together logical thought.
It didn’t take long for me to see a wide gap between the Communist saga of the exploited worker in a capitalist society and the reality as I experienced it. For some reason, insurance companies were always near the top of the list of capitalist villains in Communist propaganda. But I never felt I was being exploited. Instead, I was quite comfortable in my job, everyone treated me well, and the paternalistic culture of the traditional mutual insurance company was very appealing to my statist roots. The chinks in my ideological armor began to grow into wide-open cracks, and I sensed that it would be difficult to walk away from this job when the time came.
While my job at MetLife was both demanding and fulfilling, it had another interesting effect on me as well. Slowly—and barely perceptibly to me—it began to turn my value system upside down. At first, it was more of an attitude shift than anything else. Instead of feeling that the demands of my job interfered with my intelligence-gathering activities, it seemed that the intelligence activities interfered with my job and my life as an American.
On Thursday nights when the radiograms exceeded two hundred groups in length, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning deciphering the messages. On top of that, creating and mailing letters with secret writing every two or three weeks had also
become a burden. Having to write the open letters was tedious enough, but it took an additional hour to create the invisible writing on the message to be mailed, and then there was all the cleanup—all working papers had to be destroyed. Finally, the rules stipulated that I go on a three-hour route to check for surveillance before dropping the letter in a mailbox in the vicinity of the fictitious return address.
Another burden was the requirement that I submit an expense report every two months. The KGB was very meticulous in their desire to account for all expenses. They paid for my car and my rent, plus all my medical and travel expenses, and 50 percent of my auto expenses. They also continued to pay me a monthly salary of $600. With the salary I earned at my job, there was no longer a need for an infusion of extra cash. As a result, the balance in my account with the KGB swelled to more than $60,000.
With the demands of my daytime job and nighttime intelligence work, I felt I had no choice but to prudently cut some corners. I started writing my secret letters on Sunday afternoons and holding them overnight (against the rules). And then I skipped the surveillance check and deposited the letters in the mail chute at one of the older office buildings that had such a facility. I perfected a system to ensure there was no chance that anyone could have seen me make the mail drop, even if I was under surveillance.
Another shortcut was the elimination of the routine monthly check for surveillance. I decided that two signals in my apartment would be sufficient to alert me to the possibility of being under investigation.
The first hot spot was a drawer in my living room chest, which I left open exactly 4 mm. That gap was measurable only from below and it would be invisible in a routine inspection. It was highly unlikely that even a well-trained operative would spot this trap.
The second sensor was a hair that I glued very lightly to the underside of another drawer. One would have to know where to look to find that hair. If the drawer was opened, the hair would come unglued and drop down.
Some of my corner cutting was the result of an increasing—and possibly false—sense of security. My rationale was that I wasn’t engaged in any activity that would have triggered a law enforcement investigation.
Without a doubt, my most vulnerable moments were the dead-drop operations. With these, I still took more elaborate precautionary measures. But, even then, I was looking for ways to reduce the time the operation took. For example, I devised what I thought was a brilliant method of shaking a tail. I loaded my bicycle into the trunk of my car and drove to a park at the outer edge of the city. Then I rode the bike to a street on the other side of the park, locked the bike near a train station, and continued onto the subway. This combination of moves, which was also part of my emergency escape plan, made it next to impossible for anyone to follow me.
Despite the constraints imposed by my “above cover” life, I managed to produce some value for the Soviets. In addition to portraying at least one new contact per letter to the Center, I continued to provide reports on “the mood of the American public.” I imagine they used this type of report to flesh out the briefings they gave to various decision makers.
One spring day, I arrived at my apartment and froze when I opened the door. Inside, I saw clear evidence that someone had been there. Cautiously, I walked inside and surveyed the damage. My belongings were strewn all over the floor, my clothes were tossed on the bed, and some drawers had been removed from a chest with their contents poured out on the floor.
When I went back into the living room, I realized that my new state-of-the-art stereo system was gone. As I continued to check the apartment, I realized that the thieves had entered through the living room window, which faced a fenced-in backyard. All signs pointed to a hurried search for valuables and a quick getaway. They hadn’t found my hidden cash or the expensive tennis bracelet I was going to take to Gerlinde, but of course both my markers had been disturbed.
There was always the possibility that the break-in was staged to cover up a search by the FBI. But a footprint left by one of the intruders and a half-eaten cup of yogurt that was spilled on the carpet led me to believe that it was a real burglary.
Not taking any chances, I left the apartment immediately for a three-hour surveillance-detection run. But nobody was following me, so I slept safe and sound that night. When I reported the break-in to the Center, I noted that I saw no reason for concern.
But Moscow wasn’t so easily convinced.
WITH SIX MONTHS TO GO until Albrecht Dittrich’s next planned visit to his wife and son in Germany, Jack Barsky, living by himself in New York City, felt deeply lonely. My cover identity would never quite be complete as long as I had to stop short of building deep and lasting relationships. When all my colleagues talked about their wives, children, homes, and plans for the future, I had nothing to contribute. After more than seven years of living alone in America, what I really longed for was friendship and connection.
I met Penelope via a personals ad I placed in the Village Voice. After a first chat on the phone, we decided to meet. I suggested Tony Roma’s, a popular steak and ribs place in Greenwich Village.
Because it was winter in New York City, she was bundled up in a heavy coat with a scarf and hat. When she removed these outer garments and took off her glasses, it was as if a beautiful butterfly had emerged from its cocoon. I was definitely smitten.
We spent two hours eating and talking, and even though I made the mistake of ordering barbecued ribs—never order ribs on a first date; they’re just too messy—I enjoyed her company immensely.
“I’ve been in this country for only three years,” she said with a soft, melodious accent that I couldn’t place.
“So where are you from?” I mumbled around a mouthful of ribs.
“Guyana,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”
I had a vague notion that several places in South America were called Guyana, but not wanting to admit my ignorance, I simply nodded.
At that point she opened up. “You know, people in my country are very, very poor. My father is a well-known journalist, and we should have had a good life. But even a journalist’s income is not sufficient to feed twelve mouths.”
“Twelve children?” I said, wiping barbecue sauce from my hands with a cloth napkin. Penelope’s story seemed disconnected from the beautiful woman sitting across the table from me.
“My mother actually had fifteen children, but three of them died when they were very young. I was the second oldest, and I was only seventeen when my father left us.”
“He left your mother with twelve children? How did you all survive?”
“It was extremely difficult. There were days when we all went to bed hungry.” Clearly, the memory was still painful.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“When I turned eighteen, I became a flight attendant for Guyana Airways. Now I work as a nurse’s aide and live with a friend in Brooklyn.”
After dinner, we talked further as I walked her to the subway station. When we parted, she gave me a light kiss on the cheek. It was sweet and gentle but also intoxicating. I called her the following day and asked to see her again. We soon started seeing each other regularly, mostly on Saturdays, to take in a movie or share a meal.
It wasn’t long before Penelope was spending many Saturday nights at my place. That presented a minor problem because every three or four weeks I needed the weekend to create my reports for the Center. But Penelope never once questioned my excuses for why we couldn’t see each other—indeed, she was the perfect date for someone in my situation.
By now I had lived in the US for almost eight years, and I had immersed myself in American culture; yet I was still ignorant about many aspects of American life. Ironically, one of those areas was illegal immigration. Thus, I was perfectly unprepared for the day when Penelope asked me a very strange question.
“Can we still see each other, even if I get married to another man?”
“What? You want to get married and still date me? That
doesn’t make any sense.”
What ensued was an education—from one illegal to another—about what it was like to live in the shadows of the law (but, of course, without the support of a powerful intelligence agency).
“As an employee of Guyana Airways, I was in the US on a tourist visa,” Penelope explained. “On one of those trips, I simply did not return home but went to live with my friend Margaret in Brooklyn instead. She helped me get a job as a nurse’s aide, and I saved enough money—two thousand dollars, in all—to pay an American citizen to marry me. According to the arrangement, we would get married and he would apply for my citizenship, and then we would go our separate ways. That is the quickest way to become an American.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“And so you are married?”
“Well, I got married, but the guy never applied for a green card on my behalf. Instead, he disappeared with my money, and I got a divorce. Now I have saved up the money again, and I’m looking for another man who might be willing to marry me for a fee.”
I shook my head in disbelief, yet I also felt bad for Penelope. She was trying to better her life by doing the same thing I had done—acquiring American documentation by whatever means possible.
“How do you know that the next guy won’t cheat you like the first one did?”
“I don’t know. I just have to trust.”
“Okay, look, don’t do anything yet. Let me do some research.”
Over the next several weeks, I went to the library and studied immigration law and procedures. I also asked one of my colleagues at work who had married a woman from overseas about his experience with the authorities. At the end of my analysis, I determined that I could safely do this favor for Penelope. I had solid US documents, I had a good job, and I didn’t see how the KGB could find out. I had already determined that they trusted me and never checked on me.