Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  This visit to my house concluded the main portion of the debriefing. However, Joe and I continued to meet weekly at a diner in the village of Water Gap. He usually came with a few clarifying questions, and I would answer as best I could. Then we would spend another hour or so enjoying a light meal and talking about life, history, politics, and the human condition. We found out we had a lot in common, and after we had met a number of times, I gathered my courage and started asking him a few questions of my own.

  “So, how did you guys find me? As you know, I stopped working for the KGB in 1988. So why now?”

  “Well,” Joe began as he took a sip of coffee, “in 1991, a fellow by the name of Vasili Mitrokhin contacted British intelligence. Mitrokhin had been a KGB archivist, and over the years he had smuggled out thousands of handwritten notes copied from documents stored in the vaults of the KGB. Actually, he contacted the CIA first, but the junior officer who spoke with him did not take him seriously and showed him the door. I can bet you that guy’s career is stuck in neutral!”

  I followed the story with great interest, leaning forward as the noise of the diner faded into the background. “And there was a reference to me in those notes?”

  “Indeed. There was a reference to a Jack Barsky, code name Dieter, who was living somewhere on the East Coast as an illegal. In fact, Mitrokhin mentioned that there were nine volumes on ‘Dieter’ in the archives, but he was only able to look inside folders that documented Dieter’s career through 1984.”

  “Aha,” I said. “That explains why all the information on the outside of those phony binders in the hotel room was so old. So, how did you finally locate me?”

  “When I got the case in the fall of 1993, the director of the FBI told me personally that this was the biggest counterintelligence case we had going. An illegal with nine volumes of records at the KGB had to be taken very seriously. After all, we had just gone through the Aldrich Ames debacle.”

  We paused for a moment as our waitress came and cleared away our plates and topped off Joe’s coffee.

  “Finding you was not hard at all. Now if your name had been John Miller, that would have caused some problems, but there aren’t that many Jack Barskys in the US. When we found out you had obtained a Social Security card in your mid-thirties, had worked as a bike messenger, graduated from college with highest honors, and then went on to have a great career in IT, we knew we had our man. That’s just not normal, to say the least.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

  “By the way, you escaped detection much earlier. A few months prior to your applying for your Social Security card, the FBI canceled a program that required the Social Security Administration to notify us of anyone over thirty who applied for a Social Security card. But because the program hadn’t yielded any results, it was scrapped.”

  “How much time did you spend investigating me? After all, illegals often go through long periods of inactivity. I could have been a sleeper.”

  “That’s what we were afraid of, and for that reason we investigated slowly and very carefully. We didn’t want to alert you to the fact that we were looking at you. So, at first I watched your house from the hills across the street. I also went through your garbage on a regular basis—not a pleasant task in the heat of summer. And when the house next to you was put up for sale, the FBI bought it. We had a male and a female agent move in, and they pretended to be a couple.”

  I wanted to laugh out loud. I pictured Joe going through my trash and watching me with binoculars while I mowed the lawn or read the morning paper.

  “Of course, all that effort yielded absolutely nothing.” I said with a bit of a grin on my face.

  “Yup,” Joe sighed. “We could have finished the investigation much sooner, but then we stumbled onto something that made us pause. We found out you were friendly with a fellow who was born in Cuba and had immigrated to the US.”

  “Who? Gerard at work? He’s the smartest guy I ever worked with—what about him?”

  “Well, it turned out he owned an apartment in the Bronx that he had rented to a low-level Soviet diplomat. The alarm bells went off. Was this an international spy ring? The alarm bells rang even louder when Penelope took a trip to London. MI5 followed her the whole time.

  I shook my head in wonder at all that had gone on without my knowledge. The spy was being spied on and never knew a thing!

  “Anyway, with all that going on, we finally got permission from the Justice Department to bug your house. It didn’t take long for us to overhear an argument between you and Penelope during which you confessed to her your past affiliation with the KGB. We had our evidence and decided to move in.”

  Now the pieces of the puzzle were all in place for me. It’s not often that the subject of a criminal investigation gets to hear the whole story straight from the investigator.

  My legalization was only a matter of time, and I knew I had to be patient. Because my case was so unusual, the process was rife with difficulties, and it took several failed attempts before everything went through. While Penelope and the kids retained their original IDs and documents, the process to legalize me was much more complicated. In order to have a record of entry into the US, the FBI drove me across the St. Lawrence River into Canada and turned right back. When I reentered the US, I received a Form I-94, which became the foundation for the green card I received in 2009.

  Joe received a letter of commendation from the head of the FBI for his good judgment and judicious handling of my case, and he retired soon after the debriefing sessions officially ended. Subsequently, my connection to the FBI was maintained by three other agents, all professionals of the highest caliber. I was especially grateful to the gentleman who went out of his way to wade through the bureaucratic morass and the many layers of government to eventually finalize my case and allow me to become a US citizen. He’s still an active agent, so I won’t even mention his first name, but he’s a hero to me.

  As time passed, Joe and I got to know and like each other even more. We discovered that we had a few fundamental character traits in common. We were both hardworking and quite disciplined in support of our respective causes. However, when the situation seemed to call for flexibility, we were not averse to making ad hoc decisions that were not in the official playbook. I still remember an abrupt U-turn Joe made in Washington, DC, using the entire grass strip on the right-hand side of the road. We also had in common a bare-bones honesty, which in turn made us into very believable liars when the situation required.

  One evening in Washington, DC, he and I were taking advantage of the Marriott happy hour prior to a scheduled visit to FBI headquarters the next morning. We got into a conversation with a lively and rather inquisitive young lady, who looked at Joe and asked, “So what do you do for a living?”

  Joe didn’t miss a beat. With a deadpan delivery, he said, “We’re undersea explorers. We go to the bottom of the ocean and recover rare minerals.”

  It took a huge effort for me not to burst out laughing. There was a certain boldness and recklessness in that bald-faced lie that I could easily relate to. So it was no surprise to me that we decided to stay in touch after Joe retired. Later on, when I took up the game of golf, Joe invited me to join his group for a weekly Saturday morning outing.

  I have become an avid, though average, golfer. All in all, I’ve played more than one hundred rounds of golf with my erstwhile enemy and captor.

  AFTER GROWING UP in the privations of postwar East Germany, signing up with the KGB, and successfully infiltrating the United States of America, I had cut all ties with the Russians and continued to work my way up the ladder in American society. Just when I thought I was in the clear, I’d been caught by the FBI. Now I was living an upper-middle-class existence in the US, with a very good career in a field I loved, and I was raising two amazing children. This ex-Communist KGB spy was indeed living the American dream.

  But there were some things I couldn’t walk away from.

  Though I be
lieved I had overcome my greatest obstacles, I couldn’t escape my greatest enemy—myself. I needed more than an escape; I needed transformation.

  Most of my life was filled with material richness and contentment, but there were cracks in the foundation. Soon those cracks would expand, my foundation would crumble, and I would find myself like Humpty Dumpty, in shattered pieces on the ground.

  I knew that my marriage was already a broken mess, but we continued on for the sake of the children. I found fulfillment in my job and my support for Chelsea and Jessie.

  For six years, I dedicated much of my spare time in support of Chelsea’s basketball career, which had begun to take root when she was still young enough to be sucking her thumb.

  One day, as she and I were sitting on the couch watching Michael Jordan do one of his Superman impressions on the court, Chelsea sat up straight and asked me, “What is this?”

  “Basketball,” I said.

  “I want to do that.”

  I was elated, because it finally gave me an excuse to erect a hoop at the end of the driveway and do a little dribbling and shooting myself. Little did I know that eight years later, I would watch my baby drain a three-pointer as a freshman in her first Division I basketball game.

  Once Chelsea got a taste of the game, she stuck with it with the same kind of ferocity I had displayed when studying English. Her beginnings were humble—in her very first game, she was hit on the head by a perfectly thrown pass, which reminded me of my own first attempts at the game—but she quickly became the star of her team.

  After one season of recreational ball, I signed her up to attend the Donyell Marshall summer camp in the city of Reading, about seventy miles from our home. This was one tough camp, and the staff ran it with near military discipline. When I picked up Chelsea eight days later, she looked scratched, bruised, and totally exhausted.

  “Enough basketball for a while?” I asked when we reached the car. The stone-cold look she gave me in response was worthy of Medusa, and from that moment on I knew she was as dedicated to the sport as I had ever been. I spent the next several years supporting her as much as I could—through a disappointing high school experience and two nationally competitive travel teams. From the time she was twelve on, Chelsea never celebrated a birthday at home. There was always a tournament somewhere, and we spent countless hours in the car, driving to gyms near and far.

  All this time together deepened our father-daughter relationship and created a special bond. Even as a teenager, she actually seemed to like me. One day, I visited practice at her high school gym. When she saw me standing at the door, she ran to me and yelled, “Hey, everybody, this is my dad!”

  We also developed a language that only the two of us could understand. When Chelsea was six years old, she saw me typing without looking at the keyboard. When she asked how I could do that, I responded, “I have little eyes on my fingertips.”

  Many years later, she returned from basketball practice one day and told me, “Dad, my fingers have eyes now.”

  She and I were the only two who would know what that meant—though, in the game of basketball, my fingers never had eyes like hers did.

  Basketball also made a huge difference in Chelsea’s growth as a person. Hard work, discipline, team play, competitiveness, and grace in victory and defeat were only some of the life lessons she learned from the game.

  All the dedication and sacrifice eventually paid off. During Chelsea’s junior year of high school, we visited fifteen colleges that were recruiting her, including several Division I programs. For me, the highlight was the awesome reception we received at the United States Military Academy at West Point, a quality institution through and through.

  In late June 2005, three weeks after Chelsea’s eighteenth birthday, I drove her to Loretto, Pennsylvania, for an official visit to St. Francis University. I had long since decided that I would tell her about my past when she turned eighteen, and this four-hour drive was the ideal opportunity.

  I started hesitantly, fully aware of the bombshell I was about to drop.

  “Chelsea, I need to tell you something important. Would you mind taking your earbuds out?”

  She looked at me somewhat annoyed and said, “What?”

  “Well,” I continued. “I used to be a spy.”

  So there it was, out in the open!

  “Huh?” Now she was paying attention.

  I spent the next hour in an uninterrupted monologue, telling her the whole story—where I came from, how I got here, what I had done, and how we were all safe now. When I came to the part where I took a huge risk by blowing off the KGB so I would be able to care for her, she broke down and cried.

  The disclosure of my past moved our relationship to an even higher level, and after eighteen years I was finally able to share with my daughter the depth of the unconditional love I had for her.

  One year later, Penelope and I drove Chelsea back to St. Francis to begin her college career. We took two cars so we could leave one with Chelsea, which meant the two ladies rode together and I followed solo. Halfway into the drive, I got a call from a headhunter who was recruiting me for a new job.

  “Jack, they’re offering you the job, and they’ve thrown in a nice signing bonus to sweeten the deal.”

  “Tell them I accept—no need to play games,” I responded eagerly.

  As soon as I hung up, I called Penelope and shared the good news with her. Her reaction was mildly cheerful, and it took the edge off my excitement. At the age of fifty-six, I had reached the financial pinnacle of my life. In two weeks, I would start a job as the chief information officer for a Fortune 500 company in Princeton, New Jersey, making forty times as much as I had earned as a bike messenger. Not only that, but Chelsea was on a full scholarship, so I had no college expenses. I should have been ecstatic, but I wasn’t. The money was great, but it couldn’t make up for the continuing deterioration of my marriage.

  The drive home with Penelope was awful. She and I barely talked. After we briefly shared our impressions of the campus and the head coach, and discussed where we could pick up some Chinese food on the way home, the conversation fizzled and finally stopped altogether. We had nothing much to say to each other anymore.

  In 1999, we had moved into a brand-new home—a McMansion with a walk-in closet bigger than my first apartment in Berlin. This gorgeous house, in Pittstown, New Jersey, had a grand entrance foyer with a huge crystal chandelier, and the backyard featured a granite patio with an in-ground pool and a waterfall.

  For the first few years, Penelope had occupied herself by turning the empty shell of a house into her own home. But once all the excitement of feathering the nest was over, she fell back into the doldrums. We were now living more like roommates than a married couple. With Chelsea gone and Jessie only two years away from his eighteenth birthday, the glue that held our marriage together had lost its hold.

  I now felt very much alone in this huge house, and the bottle became a trusted companion each evening before I withdrew for the night to my separate bedroom.

  A few weeks after we dropped Chelsea off at college, I packed my bags for a trip to Pebble Beach, California, for an exclusive, three-day conference that included top-notch speakers, great golf, entertainment, and food in what many consider a paradise on earth. Spouses were invited, but Penelope refused to go.

  “You just go and be with your people,” she said.

  After a six-hour flight into San Francisco, I rented a car and drove south on the Pacific Coast Highway, arriving at Pebble Beach just after sunset. The concierge at the lodge parked my car and showed me to my room on the second floor. I walked straight to the window and opened the curtains to reveal a picture postcard view of the eighteenth hole, with a white sand bunker in front, the churning ocean in the background, and the silhouette of a magnificent cypress tree off to the left.

  Looking at all this beauty, I was suddenly struck with sadness. How I wished to be able to share this moment with somebody. I went to bed fee
ling that loneliness would be an unwelcome partner during my stay at this marvelous place.

  The next morning, after a magnificent breakfast buffet, I attended an interactive session with Stuart Varney, an economic journalist I’d seen on television many times. Digging deep into some past memories, I asked some questions about the future of the nation state and the role of the Trilateral Commission. At the intermission, Varney looked at me quizzically and said, “I would not expect these kinds of question from an IT executive.”

  There’s a lot more to me than meets the eye, I thought.

  We teed off after lunch. My group started on the famous seventh hole, which features a one-hundred-yard shot into a peninsular green surrounded by crashing waves. As luck would have it, I was up first.

  Nervously, I took a tentative swing—oh no, a bad hit! However, as if guided by magic, the ball ran onto the green, rolled forward, and came to rest about three inches from the hole.

  Of course, that’s exactly what I intended to do, I thought as the other golfers applauded my shot. In the end, my team won second prize, and I took away a marvelous crystal vase as a souvenir.

  The next two days were filled with conference sessions in the morning and golf in the afternoon. I played both Spyglass Hill and Spanish Bay, and it was indeed paradise on earth. On the final evening, the farewell party included a performance by Rain, with their incredible Beatles tribute. Both their sound and appearance were so authentic that it felt as if I were at a real Beatles concert, something I would have given all my possessions for when I was in high school. But the desire to share all of this with someone only grew, and the ache nearly outweighed the enjoyment.

  The next morning, it was time to say good-bye to paradise. There was a fine mist in the air as I got into the rental car to drive back to San Francisco. As I drove through the town of Watsonville, I suddenly started crying and couldn’t stop. I felt both stunned by my emotion and overwhelmed by my grief for something I couldn’t quite identify. Where was this sadness coming from? Was it just a letdown from having to leave this great place after such a wonderful experience? Or was it something else? It seemed the trip had not refilled my tank, but had only made me more aware of its emptiness.