by Jack Barsky
Several weeks after the final radio transmission, I drove to a parking spot near the 59th Street Bridge and took the Blaupunkt shortwave receiver from the trunk of my car. Walking out to the middle of the bridge and seeing that no one was around, I dropped the radio into the East River. The sight of that radio disappearing into the murky waters is still etched in my memory as the final act of my separation from the KGB. By destroying the radio, I silenced the voice of my former masters forever.
The spring melt of 1989 symbolically captured the inner thaw I experienced as the fear and tension of the past winter gave way to feelings of peace and security. The zigzag routes to and from work were abandoned, and Chelsea’s second birthday party wasn’t overshadowed by any anxiety about the future.
In November 1989, I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall on television. And as the Germans broke down the barrier dividing East and West Berlin, stories of suffering and separation imposed by the Communist regime began to emerge. They were stories I hadn’t heard before.
I watched it all from my adopted homeland with the emotions of a distant observer. My interest in politics and international relations had been replaced by a focus on my young family and the goal we had to establish ourselves as members of the American middle class.
As far as the KGB and Gerlinde were concerned, Albrecht Dittrich was dead. And the American Jack Barsky had no connection to that once divided country across the ocean.
WITH THE DECISION MADE and the uncertainty gone about my future, I became a normal person. There were no more late-night “computer coding sessions” on Thursdays or occasional all-day absences on Saturdays. My life now revolved around work and home.
My job became even more demanding—and rewarding. In May, I received another promotion, which came with significantly more responsibility. I was now in charge of about a thousand overnight program runs that adjudicated medical claims, created checks, and printed statements for more than one million policy holders. When things went wrong, regardless of the time, I would get a call from the computer operators—which often disrupted the sleep of our entire family. I frequently complained to Penelope about these calls, and like a true partner she decided to do something about it.
One morning, I showed up at the office as usual, but when I got off the elevator on the nineteenth floor, a welcoming committee was waiting for me in the hallway—including the vice president of our department, who was clearly fuming.
“Jack, where have you been?” he said. “The overnight processing stopped, statements and checks are not going out—but even worse, there are five hundred claims adjusters across the country twiddling their thumbs waiting for the system to come back up. I have been getting phone calls from executives all the way up the chain. You had better have a good explanation.”
I stared at him in shock. “I did not get a single call last night,” I said. “And believe me, I always hear the phone. I’m a very light sleeper.”
“Just get to work and fix this problem right away. And when you get home, make arrangements to get your phone fixed. This can’t happen again.”
I fixed the computer glitch, and at lunchtime I called home. When I asked Penelope if she knew anything about the problem with the phone, she said, “You’re always complaining about it waking us up at night. I simply took it off the hook so we could get a good night’s sleep.”
When I got home that night, I made it clear that middle-of-the-night phone calls were a necessary part of my job. “That’s one of the reasons they pay us so well. We just have to grin and bear it.”
Soon after this event, Penelope received her green card and started her first full-time job. She had taken a word processing course and was hired by a real estate development company in Manhattan. Now that we were both working full-time, we joined the ranks of American parents who had to make child care arrangements. We found a kind, elderly Italian woman who lived only a block away from our apartment, and MetLife’s management was extremely accommodating in allowing me the flexibility I needed to make the arrangement work. Penelope dropped off Chelsea on her way to work in the morning, and I started my workday at 7:00 a.m. so that I could pick up Chelsea on my way home at 4:00 p.m.
This gave us about two hours of exclusive “daddy time” before Penelope got home. When the weather was good, I took Chelsea to the local McDonalds playground, and when we were forced inside, I read her picture books such as Don’t Forget the Oatmeal!, featuring Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. Chelsea’s favorite toy was a set of wooden blocks, and she loved to watch me assemble rickety structures that she would gleefully collapse with the touch of her hand.
Her thick dark hair often got tangled, and Penelope didn’t always have the patience to deal with the mess. Chelsea would end up crying out in pain when her mother tried to brush out the snarls.
“Come sit here, little princess, and I’ll take care of it,” I’d say when the tangles got too bad. I would remove the knots strand by strand, minimizing the pain by holding onto the tufts of hair as close to the scalp as possible. This together time, and the ways in which I was able to care for Chelsea, really cemented our daddy-daughter bond.
Around the time that the Berlin Wall came down, I made another decision that reflected my determination to build a life in America.
Taking Penelope aside one day, I said, “I’ve been thinking about us and the future. Would you consider having another child?”
Penelope was delighted, and we embarked on that journey the very same night.
Another sign that I was settling into an American middle-class lifestyle was my enrollment in the company’s 401(k) plan, which all of a sudden made a lot of sense. I also began to pay more attention to the lunchtime discussions about houses and mortgages. Penelope and I, two illegal immigrants living in the US as quasi-legals, were ready to pursue one of the key elements of the American dream: a single-family home in the suburbs.
As I fully embraced my American existence, I eradicated all things German from my mind. Any thoughts about Germany and the people I had left behind would only torture my conscience, so I stashed all my memories away and tried to move forward as if my mother, my brother, Gerlinde, and even Matthias had never existed. It was as if, with Albrecht’s death, they, too, were no more. In truth, I did not speculate about the effects that my sudden disappearance may have had on those left behind or the reaction of my handlers and connections in the KGB. Even if I wanted to, there was no way to contact my mother without risking myself and my new family.
Meanwhile, a sense of urgency accelerated our house hunt as we headed into the summer of 1990.
One Saturday afternoon, Chelsea insisted that we take her outside to play. Neither I nor Penelope had time at the moment, and letting Chelsea go outside by herself was not an option.
A few minutes after I had given Chelsea a decisive no, I was startled by the sound of shattering glass. The little tyke had tried to take things into her own hands—or rather, her own feet—by kicking in the glass door that separated our upstairs apartment from the downstairs. Fortunately, she was not hurt, but she had given us a clear message, as only a two-and-a-half-year-old can: “I want freedom!”
Another reason to expedite our search was the fact that Penelope was now pregnant again. Chelsea was thrilled at the prospect of a little brother or sister, but even more so by the news a few weeks later that we had finally purchased our first home. For the next several days, she marched around the apartment singing songs about the castle she was moving into, where she could run “upstairs and downstairs, and downstairs and upstairs.”
One month after Chelsea’s third birthday, we gave her the best present ever—a castle with stairs. On a very hot day during the first week of July, we loaded our modest belongings onto a move-it-yourself van and drove to our new home in Washingtonville, New York, about sixty miles north of New York City.
For both Penelope and me, this house was far beyond what we had ever dared to imagine in our dreams. And even the heavens seemed
delighted. On the day we moved in, a huge rainbow decorated the sky right above our home.
With my job continuing to go well, I earned enough money for Penelope to be a stay-at-home mom to Chelsea and the new baby, who was soon to arrive. Though suburban life suited us well, the two-hour commute to the city was pure torture. I was now part of the great American trade-off, sacrificing my time in exchange for better and cheaper housing.
I was also able to replace my old run-down Honda with a brand-new Toyota Camry. This reliable new vehicle came in handy on the evening of September 30, 1990, when Penelope turned to me and said, “I think I’m having contractions.”
Based on our experience with Chelsea, Penelope and I wasted no time in getting out the door. After throwing some clothes on Chelsea, the three of us raced into the night on a wet, leaf-covered country road.
When we arrived at Goshen Hospital, Penelope was immediately admitted to the delivery room. Because children were not allowed and we had no one to watch Chelsea, she and I took seats in the waiting room.
But we didn’t have to wait long. True to form, Penelope delivered the baby within a half hour of our arrival, and soon the nurse was announcing for all to hear, “Mr. Barsky, you have a son!”
With Jessie’s arrival, we were now the perfect American family—with a daughter, a son, and a house in the suburbs. My life, which until only recently had been filled with plans and reports, secrets and subterfuge, had slowed down to a safe and comfortable pace.
But no matter how much I wanted to control my own destiny, I could not. While I was settling into my new life in New York, a retired KGB archivist by the name of Vasili Mitrokhin was preparing a huge stash of notes he had collected over the years. From out of the crumbling remains of the Soviet Union, he was ready to share this information with the West. Among the many secrets contained in those notes was a name I had come to call my own: Jack Barsky.
IN LATE 1991, the news of upcoming changes shook up the normally tranquil atmosphere in the offices of MetLife. One day, my manager, Mark, asked me to join him in a small conference room. As soon as he closed the door, he began talking in a hushed, almost conspiratorial voice.
“Listen, Jack, the company has made a decision to move our entire department to New Jersey.”
My jaw dropped. “Man, I just bought a house up north. There’s no way I can commute to New Jersey.”
Mark smiled and said, “We know that. We have identified you as one of a handful of key employees who will get full relocation assistance. We want you to come with us.”
So off we went on our second house-hunting adventure in eighteen months, this time in eastern Pennsylvania. After a disappointing first day driving all around the area with a real estate agent, we were on our way home when a house we passed caught Penelope’s attention.
“Look, it has a ‘For Sale’ sign, and it looks really nice,” Penelope said, grabbing my arm.
“Okay, we can come back next week to look at it.”
The following Saturday, we went to see the house. As soon as we walked inside, any thoughts I had of considering the pros and cons went out the window.
“I want this house,” Penelope announced without further ado.
“But the price seems high, and there’s not much landscaping.”
“I don’t care. This is the house I want.”
Penelope’s declaration became the first and last word on the matter, and exactly two years after moving into our first house, we moved out and made our way to rural Mount Bethel, Pennsylvania. When I say rural, I mean we had only one neighbor within earshot, and the nearest place to buy something was a gas station two miles away. But the house had all the features of Penelope’s dream home, and the setting was paradise for the kids. It also made my commute quite bearable, with a scenic drive over the hills, through the woods, and across the Delaware River before joining the bustling traffic around the commercial hub of Bridgewater, New Jersey.
Without the long commute to New York City, my work-life balance was restored. I had more time to play with the kids, who were five and two by then, and we could afford a second car—making Penelope mobile for the first time since moving out of New York City. It seemed as if we were settling into a long period of stability.
In the fall of 1992, Chelsea was supposed to start kindergarten. However, a routine placement test revealed that her verbal abilities were trailing those of her peers by almost two years. This was a shock and a revelation for me—and from that point on I stopped using “smarts” as the defining criterion in my relationships with other people. I told my colleagues at work, “I think my daughter is a little dummy, but I love her anyway.”
It turned out that my “little dummy” was actually hearing impaired and was otherwise sharp as a whip. She had developed the ability to read lips and was fooling everyone around her. Hearing aids and a special education program soon allowed my little princess to catch up with the rest of her class.
During the summer of 1994, Penelope and I loaded up the kids for our first family vacation, a visit to Penelope’s half-brother and his family in Toronto, by way of Niagara Falls.
As I drove across the Rainbow Bridge into Canada, I was briefly reminded of my previous life as a spy. Only four years earlier, this bridge was to have been my conduit to safety. But that memory was so far removed from my current reality that it seemed to have come from another universe.
But as we were taking in the awe-inspiring views at Niagara Falls, the shadows of the past were descending on our home in Mount Bethel. The name “Jack Barsky” had arrived at the FBI office in Allentown, and special agent Joe Reilly was appointed as lead agent in what was determined to be the most important counterintelligence case by the FBI at that time. While we were away on vacation, a team of FBI agents quietly broke into our house and conducted a thorough search.
The following year, when Penelope made a trip to visit her aging uncle in London, the FBI alerted MI5—the British version of the FBI—and they followed Penelope during the entire week of her stay. Neither she nor I had a clue.
Through a merger and subsequent acquisition at MetLife, my department became part of United Healthcare. I took advantage of the change to advance into the management ranks. My second assignment took me to Minneapolis, and I traveled back and forth on a weekly basis. What I didn’t know was that the FBI routinely searched my car while it was parked in the long-term lot at the airport. My transition from undercover spy to normal, everyday American was so complete that I suspected nothing.
Over the next few years, what appeared to be a stable and happy family was slowly crumbling on the inside. My relationship with Penelope was not on solid footing. No matter how well I took care of her material needs, she sensed that there was an important ingredient missing: genuine love.
She once told me, “You are a great provider and a great father, but a lousy husband.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. She drove the better car, and I brought flowers home on a regular basis. Was it that I didn’t want to go with her to the clubs she liked to visit? Or was it my refusal to join her for a Julio Iglesias concert? This lack of understanding reflected the inadequate level of my awareness at the time, but somehow even this thick-skinned German noticed that something was going in the wrong direction.
In an attempt to bring more unity to our family, I agreed to attend Sunday mass with Penelope. For about three years, the four of us attended a Catholic church in nearby Stroudsburg. To an agnostic like me, the Catholic mass was emotionally neutral and intellectually meaningless. It was neither attractive nor off-putting. I enjoyed the organ music and some of the short sermons, but all the rituals that had meaning for the Catholic congregation didn’t mean much to me or the children. The kids sat through the hour-long mass in anticipation of the fast-food reward they expected to receive afterwards, and I was always glad when the service was over.
When going to church failed to heal our marriage, I made a proposal. One morning I sat down with Penel
ope in the kitchen and started the conversation.
“I know that to you there is something missing in our relationship. Can you tell me what I can do to fix it?”
“You can’t fix something you broke a long time ago.”
“I understand,” I said contritely. “But I’m willing to make a fresh start. How about if we renew our vows on our tenth anniversary? This time we can do it in a church with a priest and a real reception afterward. What do you say?”
“You think that all you have to do is put a big Band-Aid on old wounds and everything will be well. You treated me like a nuisance when we first met, and I got used to it. Now you want to fix it by waving a magic wand? I think it’s too late for that.”
“But can we just agree that the past was bad, but we still have a long future ahead of us? Why not try to make it better?”
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” she said. “We just need to find a way to coexist.”
For some time, I had wondered whether I should ever tell Penelope the truth about the years when we were first together and of all my years before that. Frustrated that she wasn’t willing to try to work on our relationship—even if, admittedly, it had been bad for a long time—I at least wanted her to understand me. I decided to use my secret weapon.
“I need to tell you something.”
Penelope waited, but signs of impatience were evident on her face.
“This should give you an idea of how much I love you, Chelsea, and Jessie. When I first met you, I worked for the Russians. I was actually a spy. My real name is Albrecht Dittrich, but I have lived in America as Jack Barsky for a long time. Not long after Chelsea was born, the Russians wanted me to return to Moscow, but I couldn’t leave you and Chelsea, so I severed my ties with the KGB. Do you know what I’ve risked for you? I could have been captured or even killed. Does that mean anything to you?”