Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  After I became a US citizen, I applied for the elusive document I had been so eager to acquire three decades earlier. On the day the passport arrived in the mail, I opened the envelope and pulled out the navy-blue booklet. After having had my picture pasted onto so many forgeries over the years, it was odd to see it once and for all at home on a genuine American document.

  Well, Alex and Sergej and everyone else, I finally have a real US passport.

  Now that I had the prized document in my hands, the idea of returning to Germany for a visit came bursting from the back of my mind and began to gather steam. Finally, I told Shawna, “I have to go, and I have to go as soon as possible!”

  By that time, I had established e-mail connections with a number of old friends from high school and university, and soon a plan took shape for a journey into the past that included meeting seventeen people in nine locations over a span of two weeks. Those plans did not include my family of origin. My mother would have been ninety-four by then, and it was unlikely she was still alive. I hadn’t talked to my father since I was seventeen, and I had lost contact with my brother back when I was still living in Berlin.

  There was another wrinkle to this trip—the German media. The year before, Shawna and I had received an unlikely visitor—her half brother, Richard. He had grown up in Germany, and Shawna had never met him. When Richard found out I was German, he inquired about my background.

  “So how did you get here?” he asked as we took a walk around the pond on our property. I’d expected this question at some point.

  “Well, I had some help from the government,” I answered a bit slyly.

  “Which government?” Richard probed. “The Germans or the Americans?”

  “Neither one, to tell you the truth. It was actually the Russians.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well . . . I’m a retired Soviet spy.”

  “What?” Richard stopped in his tracks.

  This was the stock reaction I received from people in response to my initial disclosure. But then Richard continued, “Let’s go back to the house. I want to write this down.”

  After he finished taking two pages of notes, he said enthusiastically, “I promise, this is going to be huge.”

  Sure, Rich, I thought to myself, suppressing the urge to roll my eyes. How in the world would an employee of the German railroad be able to make my story public?

  Well, I underestimated Richard. He had a friend who was close to Susanne Koelbl, a journalist for Der Spiegel—a top German publication and the very magazine I had studied diligently to learn about Western culture during my training in Berlin and Moscow. Frau Koelbl and I talked by phone a few times, but we agreed that nothing would be done until my legal status in the US was clarified. Shortly before my scheduled departure, I located my brother online and gave his information to Der Spiegel. A reporter spoke to Hans-Günther, who confirmed that our mother had passed away. The reporter also obtained some old family photos, which he passed along to me. Hans-Günther was interviewed by Der Spiegel TV and appeared briefly in a documentary they produced. When I tried to contact my brother directly, he sent me a brief e-mail updating me on his current situation in life, but he concluded by saying, “After thorough consideration, I have determined that I do not want to have a relationship with you.”

  On the morning of October 17, 2014, I closed my suitcase, kissed Shawna and Trinity good-bye, and set out on yet another adventure.

  The flight to Germany was a painful reminder that today’s airline seats are not designed for anyone over six feet tall. But as I limped toward the line for passport control at Berlin Tegel Airport, the cobwebs in my head were blown away. This was my first border crossing in twenty-eight years, and this time I would be presenting a genuine passport, not a forgery. But what if the Germans knew that I was actually Albrecht Dittrich? What if I had been declared an enemy of the state and would be arrested on the spot?

  I approached the passport control agent with the same nervous feeling I’d felt decades earlier, but he passed me right on through. I may have surprised him with my accent-free German, but in any case my entry into the country was routine.

  The plan was to leave my bags at the hotel and connect with Richard to spend the day just wandering around the city. Yet, as my tired, aching legs dragged me slowly down the main concourse, I noticed a handful of people looking directly at me.

  Is there something wrong with me? Am I so disheveled that I would attract the attention of strangers?

  Next, I spotted Richard leaning against a wall some sixty feet ahead of me.

  Why is he not making an effort to greet me?

  The answer became clear when a microphone was suddenly thrust in my face and I noticed a handheld professional camera pointed at me. Three days before my trip, I had e-mailed Susanne Koelbl to let her know I would be in Berlin and that we could meet for a cup of coffee if she was interested. Being the good journalist that she is—who clearly has a flair for the dramatic—she did not want to miss the historic moment of my return to German soil.

  She asked her first question in German, but my attempt to answer coherently in my mother tongue was so garbled that my first words upon returning to my homeland were later charitably laid to rest on the cutting-room floor.

  Thankfully, Frau Koelbl switched to English and my answers were recorded for broadcast on German television. My responses betrayed the physical and emotional fatigue and the trepidation I felt regarding this entirely new adventure. A lot of questions were swirling around in my head, and some of the possible answers were frightening. Would I be rejected by friends and family? Would they, in typical German fashion, tell me to my face that my choices had been morally wrong, even disgusting and despicable? How could I leave my mother, wife, and son, and disappear without a trace? Would I be able to answer those questions honestly and credibly? I now realized that this visit could potentially turn into another high-stress moment in my life.

  Thankfully, once the interview was completed, the conversation turned to the logistics of the day and pushed the dark thoughts aside. We left my bags at the hotel and ate breakfast at one of the many cafés found on almost every block in Berlin. The German coffee was strong and tasty, and the pastries took me back fifty years. The bakers had not lost their touch.

  For the next two days, Richard, Frau Koelbl, and I roamed the streets of Berlin. Except for the area between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz, East Berlin was hardly recognizable. Older buildings had either been replaced or prettied up, and there was construction going on everywhere. I could not even recognize the apartment building in Lichtenberg where I had lived forty years earlier. Germany was still making massive investments in their attempts to restore Berlin to its former glory as the nation’s capital.

  The Berlin Wall is typically one of the first places where visitors want to go. For me, it was the first time I had taken a close look at the monster that for thirty-eight years had divided the country. At the time the wall was erected, I lived in a remote part of East Germany. We had no family in the West, and I didn’t know anybody who did. All through my growing-up years, and well into my time with the KGB, I accepted the wall as a necessary evil designed to protect the fledgling Communist state from the Nazi-infested ruling class of West Germany. My life was going so well in East Germany that I never had even a fleeting thought of going over to the West. Thus, it never occurred to me during those years that the primary purpose of the wall was not to keep the Westerners out, but to keep the East Germans in.

  It was all the more eye-opening for me to visit the Berlin Wall Museum and finally become aware of the evil this death strip represented. Hundreds of East Germans had been murdered for something Americans take for granted—the God-given freedom to choose where to go and where to live.

  There was yet another shadow that followed me on my travels—the ghost of the Stasi, the East German secret police. It began with a visit to the Stasi Museum.

  Years earlier, I had read Man withou
t a Face, the autobiography of Markus Wolf, the head of the Stasi’s main directorate for reconnaissance. Many in the international intelligence community regard Wolf as the greatest spymaster of the twentieth century. One of his operatives, Günter Guillaume, caused the downfall of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1974. I found nothing new in that book about the methods and tactics employed by undercover agents, but I was completely unprepared for what I found at the museum. I was appalled by the lawless activities the Stasi had employed to monitor and control the citizens of East Germany.

  At the height of its power, the Stasi had about 80,000 full-time employees and 170,000 signed volunteers—one agent for every forty adult citizens of the country. A majority of those agents spent their time watching and reporting on friends, neighbors, and even family. According to my German friends, the movie The Lives of Others is an accurate depiction of the insidious activities of the Stasi.

  The massive amount of data collected by the Stasi was too much to be destroyed on the day the wall came down, and what survived has still not been fully processed to this day. I walked out of that museum with feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, and anger. The Stasi and the KGB had been partners in crime, and I had been a loyal employee and willing participant in their scheme.

  The foundation of my Marxist-Leninist ideology had long since crumbled, but my visit to East Berlin and the Stasi Museum was another step in cleaning up the toxic rubble. I saw God’s hand in guiding this trip to help me become whole and to reconcile my American present honestly and cleanly with my German past.

  MY NEWLY ACQUIRED PERSPECTIVE of the Stasi horrors became a silent companion on my trip to Jena, the town where I spent my university years.

  My college buddy Günter met me in Berlin and we made the trip together. Forty-five years gives Father Time plenty of opportunity to make his mark on people, and Günter was no exception. During our college years, he had been slight of frame with long arms, a thick head of black hair, and a mustache. Now his frame had almost doubled in size, and most of his hair was gone. But his bright, slightly mischievous eyes were a dead giveaway—this was still my good friend Günter.

  The next two and a half hours in the car together were delightfully entertaining. Günter is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met, so he mostly talked and I mostly roared with laughter. And because he still had the accent of his hometown, Jena, his tales took me back emotionally to the time of our youth.

  Most of Günter’s stories had to do with his professional past. In the 1970s, the East German government had overestimated the demand for highly trained chemists. As a result, Günter had difficulty finding a job after college, as did many of his fellow doctoral students. Finally, he found employment as a scientist with the Stasi forgery department—which, with the exception of money, forged everything worth forging. Given that engineering is in the German DNA, it’s not surprising that Günter and his colleagues became world class at their devious craft. Because of his outstanding work, Günter wound up heading the entire department.

  After the wall came down, the West Germans recognized the excellence of Günter’s operations, and while the Stasi itself was smashed to pieces, his department was fully integrated into a unified all-German intelligence service. To his consternation, Günter was forced into early retirement, and as an ex-Stasi member he saw his government pension cut in half. But thanks to his wife’s pension from her career as a teacher, the two still manage to live comfortably in a suburb of Berlin.

  When we arrived in Jena, it was already dark. Günter and I checked into our hotel and proceeded to the restaurant where we would meet my son Günther; his mother, Edeltraud; and his stepfather, Bruno. Two years earlier, Günter had connected me to Edeltraud via e-mail, and my son had come to visit for two weeks at my house in New Jersey. Much like my experience with Matthias, that initial reunion started out feeling awkward and uncomfortable but ended with a genuine hope for a new beginning. Now I was here to meet him again and to reconnect with his mother some forty years after we had last seen each other.

  It was an unusually warm October evening, and Günther, Edeltraud, and Bruno were sitting at an outside table waiting for us. As we approached the table, Günther suddenly became animated. He stood up, pointed at Günter, and asked his mother, “Who is that?”

  When she responded, he became furious.

  “Either he goes or I go!”

  There was no reasoning with the young man. Apparently, Edeltraud had told him that Günter was ex-Stasi, and there was no way that my son would break bread with a hated former agent. Forced to choose between my friend and my son, there was really no choice to be made. I sat down with my son and his parents, and Günter had to leave the scene. We made plans to reconnect the next day to visit some other friends, and he walked off defeated and somewhat befuddled. But such was the hatred that most East Germans felt toward the Stasi even twenty-five years after the wall came down.

  Even though we are now ideologically worlds apart, Günther and I were able to rekindle our friendship and are likely to continue to be friends as long we’re on this earth.

  History has been kind to the dreamy little city of Jena, one of the few East German towns that truly thrived after reunification. Unlike Berlin, which has undergone a radical face-lift, Jena still presents itself to the world much as it did fifty years ago. Most of the buildings I remembered from when I lived there are still standing, but they’ve been spruced up and are a lot more attractive. I had no problem finding all the old haunts from my college days: the five-hundred-year-old headquarters of the university where Professor Siegmund Borek recruited me for the Communist Party, the Rosenkeller student club where I spent countless Saturday nights, the dormitory where I was first approached by the KGB, the auditorium where I listened to many chemistry lectures, the building with the lab where I set myself on fire, and the yard where I conducted the mustard gas experiment.

  Even the restaurant Die Sonne, where I met my first KGB handler, was still in business, albeit freshly painted on the outside and completely redone inside.

  That evening, I had dinner with four of my former basketball teammates. This was a raucous event that took me back to the days when we would celebrate a win or mourn a loss with full steins of excellent beer.

  I spent some time with the journalists from Der Spiegel and time with some other friends. I was also afforded the opportunity to finally apologize to Edeltraud for the immature and cowardly way I had treated her during her pregnancy and after Günther was born. Amazingly, she forgave me.

  I spent my final evening in Jena exclusively with my son Günther, and the next morning I said good-bye to Jena with a heavy heart.

  After Jena, I made forays into Rietschen, Bad Muskau, and Spremberg, with a quick stop at Reichenbach that yielded an unexpected treasure—a certified copy of my birth certificate. Though I had no documentation to prove that I was indeed Albrecht Dittrich, I knew too much about the people who had lived in Reichenbach during my childhood to have been a fake.

  Unfortunately, Opa Alwin’s high school was no longer in use. The magnificent building was boarded up, testimony to the decay that befell this part of Germany after the reunification. Similarly, the school building in Rietschen, the village where we lived during my first ten years, was also empty and boarded up.

  The house in Bad Muskau, where I spent the second decade of my life, was still there, freshly renovated and painted, but quite recognizable. The front door with the mail slot that Rosi’s good-bye letter came through was still in its original state. But gone were the outhouse and the Russian writing on the north wall. A chat with an eighty-year-old resident who remembered my mother yielded some interesting information about the fate of other neighbors, but there was really not much to do or see, so I continued my trip northward.

  During my last few days in Berlin, I reconnected with Matthias and his lovely wife, Désirée, and I continued to marvel at how Chelsea had single-handedly managed to bridge the gaps between our family
members. However, the one relationship that seemed beyond repair was with Gerlinde. I wanted to try, but how could I even begin to explain, much less justify, my betrayal of her? Matthias and his wife asked me not to contact Gerlinde, to avoid reopening barely healed wounds of the past, and I knew I had to respect their request.

  Before I left Berlin, there was one more surprise in store for me, one more opportunity to tie up a loose end.

  I was sitting in Matthias’s apartment, going through some printed material that my classmate Jürgen had given me, when I noticed a list of addresses and phone numbers. I saw that Rosi was on the list and that she had a Berlin address.

  “Should I give her a call?” I wondered out loud.

  Matthias looked at me quizzically, but when I explained to him the role that Rosi had played in my life, he put on his most wicked grin and said, “Of course you must call her. This should be interesting!”

  Without giving it any more thought, I dialed the number.

  “Hallo?”

  “Guess who this is. . . . Take a deep breath,” I said. “This is Albrecht.”

  Fifteen seconds of silence were followed by a shriek. “Oh my! Are you serious? I have to sit down!”

  Apparently, like many others, Rosi had believed the rumors that I had perished in a rocket accident in Kazakhstan. When I called her, it was as if I had come back from the dead. We agreed to meet over coffee the following afternoon.

  When I arrived at the agreed-upon place, Rosi was already there, sitting on a worn park bench in front of Zion Church. There was no mistaking her identity; it was still Rosi. The beautiful features I had fallen in love with fifty-five years earlier still shone through, though like all of our faces, hers had weathered with time.

  For me, the past fifty years had completely healed any wounds that were caused by the abrupt breakup of our relationship. I was driven more by my innate curiosity to know how her life had been.