by Jack Barsky
Penelope’s response was totally unexpected. At first, I thought she didn’t believe me. I could see her mind working as she processed what I had just revealed. After a lengthy pause, she said, “So what you’re telling me is that you’re in this country illegally? That means I am not really legal either. What if they find out and throw us both out of the country and take Jessie and Chelsea away from me?”
With that, she ran out the back door crying. My secret weapon had completely backfired.
As it turned out, that backfire caused more damage than I could have possibly guessed. The FBI had bugged our house during their break-in, and they were listening to the entire conversation. They now knew that they had their man, and they even had a taped confession.
BY THE MIDDLE OF MAY 1997, warm weather had taken over in the Northeast. It was a Friday, and I wanted to leave work as early as possible, eager for a head start on a great spring weekend in the country. I was especially looking forward to a game of two-on-one basketball with my children, who at the ages of ten and seven had already become serious competition for their aging dad.
At four o’clock, I decided to make a run for it. Cautiously sneaking through the maze of cubicles, taking a circuitous route to avoid the boss’ office, I slipped out the door and sprinted to the parking lot.
Four months earlier, I had resigned from United Healthcare and accepted a director’s position with Prudential. The fifty-mile drive to our house in Mount Bethel was a welcome change from longer commutes in the past.
Today, as expected, the westbound traffic on I-80 was stop-and-go. After forty-five minutes of battling an army of fellow commuters from the seat of my white Mazda 323, I was finally in the clear. It would be smooth sailing until I hit the Portland-Columbia Toll Bridge just five minutes from my house. As I emerged from the tollgates, a Pennsylvania state trooper waved me over for what appeared to be a routine traffic stop.
“Sir, would you please step out of the car?” he asked when I rolled down my window. I thought this was a little strange, but I still was not alarmed.
Then I noticed another man—in civilian clothes—approaching the car. He was a middle-aged, stocky fellow with a receding hairline. He held up a badge and said in a calm voice, “Special Agent Reilly, FBI. We would like to talk with you.”
I’m certain that I looked stunned by these words, which seemed to come from a parallel universe I had left light-years ago. My past had finally caught up with me.
What I didn’t know yet was that the FBI had started working on the Barsky case in late 1993. When they zeroed in on my location, the case was assigned to the Allentown office, and Special Agent Joe Reilly was put in charge. With his extensive experience in counterintelligence, he was up to the task.
After speaking to Elisha Lee Barsky, whose son Jack had passed away in 1955, it was clear to Agent Reilly that they had their fish on the hook—but they had no idea how big that fish might be.
Even though the Soviet Union had collapsed two years earlier, there was always a chance that a sleeper agent or an entire cell was still operative—or at least ready to be reawakened. Because I had helped Penelope gain citizenship, the suspicion was that we were working as a couple, a frequently used mode of operation by Soviet agents.
Furthermore, I had applied for a US passport via the mail in 1989. Although the passport was issued, I never received it. But the notion that I had emergency cash and a valid US passport raised the possibility that I was a flight risk.
Joe Reilly, however, had come to the conclusion that I had fully integrated into American society and that my affection for my children made it very likely that I would cooperate fully with the American authorities. The plan for the first encounter was to detain me but not arrest me, and to demand my full cooperation without any promises in return.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this, and I feared the worst. Reilly later told me that the moment I saw his badge, all the blood drained from my face and I turned white as a sheet. However, he also marveled at my quick recovery and the coolness and fatalistic stoicism I displayed throughout the evening.
The FBI’s preparations for the day of the encounter were meticulous. The tollgate was an ideal point to stop me away from my home. For what was to follow, the Reilly team had rented an entire wing of the Pocono Inn at Water Gap in the borough of Delaware Water Gap.
Agent Reilly drove the car, and his partner, David Roe, joined me in the backseat. Noticing that Roe had a gun strapped to his ankle reminded me that this was very serious business. As we made our way north on Route 611, I asked the most important question: “Am I under arrest?”
“No.”
That simple answer brought me a glimmer of hope.
Next, I displayed a sense of gallows humor by asking, “What took you so long?”
The answer was suppressed laughter—the ice was almost broken.
After a fifteen-minute ride along a winding country road, we reached the hotel. Inside, I noticed guards at both ends of the hallway as I was escorted to a room in the middle.
Inside the room were a number of thick binders lined up on shelves around the walls. These binders were labeled with bits and pieces of information of my early years in the US. One of the labels contained the Ella Borisch convenience address I had used until 1981. Another one had “Dieter” written in big letters on it.
These props were an obvious psychological trick, which I recognized immediately in spite of the pressure I was under. The binders were indeed empty, but there was nothing the FBI needed to do to convince me that the only way out of this precarious situation was 100 percent full cooperation.
I emphatically volunteered this logic to my captors, and I believe they understood. Other than my family and myself, I had nothing left to defend. By 1997, I had lost any illusions I once had about the Communist ideal. With that gone, any vestige of loyalty to my erstwhile employer and its representatives had melted as well.
After we sat down, Joe Reilly began the debriefing with a simple statement: “Jack, this does not have to be the worst day of your life.”
The glimmer of hope became a small flickering flame.
Before the debriefing session began, I was allowed to call Penelope and tell her I was going to be late because of some problems at work. Having studied me in great detail, Reilly knew I was suffering from hypertension. It was quite comforting to hear him ask whether I needed my blood pressure medication.
The first session covered all the basics, such as real name, date and place of birth, education, and recruitment.
After two hours, Agent Reilly told me I’d be released for the night to return to my home. He said I should spend the weekend trying to relax. That was easy for him to say. I wouldn’t begin to relax for another few weeks. Just prior to releasing me, Reilly introduced me to the head of the surveillance unit, who said to me with the face and tone of a headmaster addressing an undisciplined student, “Don’t even think about running. We will be watching your house, and we have every road and intersection in the area covered. You cannot get away.”
That warning wasn’t necessary. Flight wasn’t an option for me—where would I go? Instead, I spent Sunday, May 18, 1997, my real forty-eighth birthday, wondering where I would celebrate my fiftieth.
On the following Tuesday, Agent Reilly and his partner took me to the Allentown FBI facility. As I rode in the back of the car, Reilly turned around with an arm over the seat.
“We need to give you a lie detector test—this test is critical for your future. I think we can believe you, but we need to have a positive test on record to proceed.”
I had no idea what to expect. In the movies, those tests are often depicted as a third-degree interrogation with a hostile interviewer and a bright light shining in the subject’s face. As I soon found out for myself, a real lie detector test is the most low-key interrogation imaginable. There were no bright lights, all questions were disclosed in advance, and the only answers allowed were a whispered “yes” or “no.”
The instruments are so sensitive that they can pick up the slightest physiological changes triggered by a lie.
Agent Reilly got us past the guard at the Allentown office, and we walked up to a room that was furnished with a sofa, a table, and four chairs. He introduced me to the examiner, who opened a wooden case and extracted a number of measuring devices that he proceeded to attach to me—a clip on my fingertips, a blood-pressure cuff on my arm, and a curled wire around my chest.
To begin the test, the examiner read all the questions to me. Then there was a practice run, during which he asked all the questions and I answered them. After that, he activated the measuring devices—which collected skin conductivity, blood pressure, heart rate, and other physiological data—and sat down on a chair behind me to start asking the questions.
“Are we in Allentown, Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“Is your name Jack Barsky?”
“Yes.”
“Is your birth name Albrecht Dittrich?”
“Yes.”
“Do you currently work at MetLife?”
“No.”
The entire procedure took no more than fifteen minutes, after which the examiner retreated to another room while Agent Reilly and I passed the time with small talk in the examination room. When the examiner emerged a half hour later, he said, “You passed all the questions except for this one,” pointing at one of the questions on a sheet of paper. I studied the question—Have you not severed all ties with the KGB?—and suddenly it struck me: “This question has an implied double negative. Is that important?”
“Indeed it is,” answered the examiner. “I will rewrite the question, and you will have to come back another day to answer it. We need a complete test result.”
Agent Reilly dropped me off at a parking lot in the town of Bangor, where my car was parked, and I drove myself home. The polygraph test had made me very nervous—particularly failing that one crucial question. When I arrived home, it was still early in the day, and I was too antsy to just sit around, so I pulled out the string trimmer and went to work on a very steep slope at the edge of my property.
As I was standing with one foot well below the other, attacking the pesky weeds, I suffered a near panic attack. My heart raced, and I found it hard to breathe.
What’s going to happen to me?
What if I fail the test again? Will I go to jail after all?
What about Jessie and Chelsea?
Those thoughts continued to play back in my mind. No matter how hard I tried to come up with answers by analyzing what the FBI agents had said and done, there were no answers. All I could do now was hope.
I didn’t sleep well that night, and for several nights afterward, but my mood improved radically a week later after I passed the final lie detector question. I knew now that the FBI believed I was telling the truth.
OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS, Joe Reilly and his partner conducted a number of detailed debriefing sessions with me.
“We’re going to start from the beginning—your beginning—and you need to be honest and up front about everything.”
“I have nothing more to hide,” I said, and that’s exactly how I felt. I had lived undercover for so many years with nobody knowing the real me—and often I didn’t even know the real me—so now, for the first time, I was able to tell everything without holding back.
We met once or twice a week at the same hotel and went over my entire biography and KGB career with a fine-tooth comb. When we were done, I had the feeling that agents Reilly and Roe knew more about my life than I did.
“You don’t know why they recruited you?” Agent Roe pressed me.
“No. It could have been through the Party or maybe my friend Günter or because I won the scholarship. They never told me. Just one day I got that knock on my dorm-room door. I thought the fellow was Stasi, but he could have been a KGB collaborator. He never even mentioned his name.”
We took a field trip to New York City, and I showed the agents a number of spots I had used for dead-drop operations. I showed them a rock formation with the word Styx on one of the boulders in Cunningham Park, Queens; a hollow tree in Inwood Hill Park on the northern tip of Manhattan; and another hollow tree in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
Finally, we went to search for my stash of emergency documents—the Canadian passport and driver’s license I had hidden away fifteen years earlier. We drove to an area near the Gun Hill Road subway station in the Bronx and made our way north on a small dirt path that runs through the middle of a one-hundred-yard wide greenbelt between the Bronx River Parkway on the west and Bronx Boulevard on the east. There were overgrown weeds and shrubs on both sides of the path.
At one point, I turned to Joe Reilly and said, “This is going to be tough. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to find the spot again.”
Five minutes later, I stopped dead in my tracks.
“You got something?” Reilly asked.
I pointed to the remnants of a park bench on the left side of the path. The wood was all gone, but the two concrete legs were still in the ground.
“Just maybe . . .” I said, as I approached the left-hand leg. Reaching down, I pulled hard on the post to expose the bottom, and there it was. The package I had buried underneath that leg fifteen years earlier was still there.
“Pay dirt!” I exclaimed triumphantly, knowing that this discovery proved both my truthfulness and my excellent memory.
We returned from New York City and resumed the debriefing process the following week. Every night I went home and acted as if everything was fine, but inside my stress level continued to rise. The FBI was still keeping me in the dark about their plans for the future.
Other than the sessions with Agent Reilly and his partner, my work and home life routine never changed. Remarkably, neither Penelope nor any of my coworkers observed any signs of stress.
Though Reilly wouldn’t even hint about my future, he and I seemed to have forged at least a tenuous connection, both intellectually and emotionally. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be put in jail or deported to Germany, with unknown consequences to Penelope and my children, whose innocent lives would be completely disrupted.
During one of our meetings, I asked with some trepidation, “Penelope says she wants to visit her brother in Toronto. Can she go, and can she take the kids?”
A week later, Agent Reilly told me that the Bureau had decided to allow our entire family to cross the border. They did not want to disrupt the normal activities of my family, and it was still too early to let Penelope in on the ongoing investigation.
This seemed to be a very positive sign that they trusted me. Who would allow a former spy to leave the country if they didn’t trust him?
It was a hot Thursday in the middle of July. Once again, as I had been doing for the past two months, I drove past the left-hand turn onto the Columbia-Portland Toll Bridge and continued straight ahead to the village of Water Gap for yet another debriefing session.
How much longer can this go on? I asked myself. We have been through my life forwards and backwards. What else can I possibly tell them?
I knocked on the door of the hotel room, and when Joe Reilly opened the door he had a big grin on his face.
“Come on in,” he said. “Today is your lucky day.”
“What do you mean?”
“The United States government has made a decision about your future. In appreciation of your honesty and full cooperation, you will be allowed to stay in the country and so will your family.”
This was by far the best news I had received in my entire life. I could barely suppress a loud scream of joy and relief. There was a future for all of us, and it would be a good one!
“The FBI will work on cleaning up your record and providing you with honest and legitimate documentation,” Reilly said. “This may take a while because your case is very unusual. Typically, folks like you are given a new identity and put in the witness protection program. However, you are so enm
eshed in American society that this option would only disrupt you and your family. So, instead, we will try to clean you in place.”
Delirious with joy, I said, “Can I tell Penelope now?”
“I think we should do that,” he said.
The following Friday, I told Penelope that she needed to be at home on Saturday morning because “some local government officials want to ask us a few questions about land use in the neighborhood.” I hoped this lie would be the last one I would ever have to tell.
The “local officials,” Joe and Dave, showed up the next morning at 10:00. We took seats at the kitchen table, and Joe opened the conversation.
“Mrs. Barsky, we understand that you’re aware that Jack here used to be a KGB agent. We know that too. We’re from the FBI.”
Penelope’s face turned ash gray, but before she could say anything, Joe continued.
“That’s not a bad thing. Jack has cooperated with us fully, and the US government has decided not to press charges. Your entire family will be allowed to stay in this country.”
Penelope did not grasp everything Joe had said, and with a noticeable tremble in her voice, she said, “I knew there would not be a good ending to this. I knew it!” Turning to me angrily, she continued, “How could you do something like this to me and the children? Answer me!”
At that point, Agent Roe interrupted in a calm voice. “Mrs. Barsky, please take a deep breath. Everything will be fine. You have a beautiful house on Allegheny Road, and you will keep it. Your husband will keep his job, and one day you all will be free to go wherever you want. It will just take a bit of time to go through all the formalities to get Jack documented properly.”
When that sank in, Penelope breathed a sigh of relief, but deep inside I knew she was not at peace. Numerous times since my confession to her, she had expressed her anger about my secret. She was married to a spy and a liar, someone she could never really trust.