AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, I had told the Center via secret writing that I was running out of money. Three weeks later, they informed me in one of their routine weekly shortwave radiograms of a proposed dead-drop operation on a Sunday in April. When I decrypted the code, the details regarding place and time emerged. The site was in Kissena Park in Flushing.
The week before the planned operation, I went to that part of Queens to find the site and identify the two signal spots. I had no problem finding the drop site, but I was terribly disappointed with the location. Eugen would have given this one an F. It was right out in the open, in a park where there was certain to be a lot of foot traffic on a Sunday in April.
It was too late to call off the operation, and I really did need the money, so I made plans to follow through on schedule.
On the following Sunday, I left the hotel at 11:00 a.m, armed with a black plastic shopping bag and a piece of white chalk. The first order of the day was to check for surveillance.
From the hotel, I took the subway to Times Square, checked out the movie displays, walked to Macy’s, went up the escalator, checked out the goods on display, turned around, went down the elevator, changed my mind, and went back up. Then I left the store, took a crosstown bus to Grand Central Station, bought a train ticket for later, walked to Saks Fifth Avenue, went up the elevator and down the escalator, then up the escalator and down the elevator. Next, I took a train to 86th Street and followed the same routine inside Gimbel’s. This went on and on, for three hours, until I had determined that nobody was following me.
At about two o’clock, I boarded the #7 train to Flushing. I reached the Flushing Main Street station early, so I had a quick snack at a Chinese restaurant to kill time. At exactly 3:05 p.m, I began my purposeful walk toward the signal site near Kissena Park. At exactly 3:15, I saw a vertical chalk mark on a lamp pole. The container had been placed. Within two minutes, I was at the drop site where the container was supposed to be.
Because the whole area was out in the open, I was very nervous. I had completed my own surveillance detection, but what if the resident agent had been followed and didn’t know it? What if the FBI was lurking somewhere nearby, armed with a camera to catch me in the act?
From a distance, I spotted the dented oilcan lying next to a drainage grate at the edge of the park. For the last fifty steps, my legs felt as if they were filled with lead. I finally reached the drop site, looked around briefly, and snatched up the container, dropping it quickly into the plastic bag.
Before returning to the hotel, I surveyed the park and made my way to another lamppost. Leaning over casually, I struck the pole with the chalk, making a horizontal line to indicate that I had retrieved the container. Then I wasted no time leaving the area.
Back at the hotel, I pulled out the oilcan and turned it over, trying to figure out how to open it. The agent had done a great job of securing the goods inside the can. Finally, I used a knife to pry off the lid of the can and found three more layers of packing inside: a wire mesh, duct tape, and a clear plastic bag. After a half hour of poking, prying, and cutting with a pair of scissors, I finally succeeded in extricating the prize: a neatly pressed stack of freshly printed one hundred dollar bills, totaling a whopping $10,000.
After putting four hundred dollars into my wallet, I attached the remainder to the back of the refrigerator with a magnet, a spot that the cleaning staff was unlikely to ever go near.
Eleven months had now passed since my arrival, and I still had no idea what kind of work I might be able to find. I had no job history in the US, no marketable manual skills, and Albrecht Dittrich’s academic credentials were of no use to Jack Barsky.
For months, I studied the want ads in several newspapers. I also researched the two jobs the Center had suggested: longshoreman or taxi driver. Neither one seemed a viable option for me. Longshoremen belonged to an exclusive union that typically admitted only the well-connected into their ranks. Taxi drivers had to work long hours to make a living, and the frequent stories in the news about cabbies being robbed and assaulted by street thugs convinced me to reject this option. I finally concluded that the only unskilled job that was readily available to someone like me was that of a messenger working for minimum wage.
Early one Monday morning, in August 1979, with a newspaper ad in hand, I showed up at the offices of Swift Messenger Service on West 46th Street, a midtown location between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The office was a storefront with a picture window facing the street. A dispatcher sat behind a desk at the back, and a few colorful characters were seated on wooden benches that lined the two side walls of the room.
Though it was barely 9:00 a.m, the place was already busy. As I walked up to the desk, people were constantly coming and going—picking up packages and dropping them off.
When I reached the desk, I waited for the dispatcher to have a free moment.
“Good morning,” I said when my turn came. “I read your ad in yesterday’s Daily News.” I waved the newspaper to punctuate my statement.
The man looked me up and down and paused for a moment.
“Do you have a bike?” he asked.
“I can get one.”
“Okay then, show up tomorrow at 8:30 sharp with your bike and a shoulder bag. And don’t forget to bring one of those Kryptonite U-locks—bikes get stolen all the time. Oh, by the way, my name is Jay, and I’m the chief dispatcher here. See you tomorrow.”
As I walked out of the office, I was still pondering the situation. During my wanderings around Manhattan, I had often noticed the antics of some of the cyclists in city traffic. They rode on sidewalks, weaved in and out of traffic, and traveled the wrong way on one-way streets, all the while frantically blowing on whistles to announce their presence.
This was going to be one heck of a dangerous job!
I wondered if I could really do it. Even more to the point, should I do it? Should I risk life and limb and my assignment? I remembered the first time I had ridden a bike as a young boy and how I had plowed into a neighbor who had once referred to me as an awkward sad sack. He had become a victim of his own prophecy.
But they say that riding a bike is a skill one never forgets, and in the absence of a reasonable alternative for employment, I decided to give it a try. I found a bike shop on Eighth Avenue and bought a brand-new black ten-speed, a U-Lock, a whistle, and a messenger’s shoulder bag, for a grand total of $155.
The next morning, I took my bike down the elevator and very cautiously began my first bike ride in the big city, down Broadway to 46th Street and across town to the Swift office.
When I arrived shortly before 8:30, Jay seemed genuinely happy to see me.
“Let me tell you how this works—it’s not brain surgery.” He rose from the desk and pointed to a table full of packages. Each package had a rectangular piece of paper on top. Jay removed one of these slips and said, “This here is a ticket. Every package has a ticket associated with it. There are three sections: customer information, pickup address, and delivery address. We fill out all the tickets here in the office. All you need to do is get a signature from the person you deliver the package to.”
“Sounds easy enough,” I said eagerly.
But Jay wasn’t finished yet. “When I started in this job, I changed things to make us more efficient. Most of our customers are right in this area, so I have foot messengers pick up the packages, assemble them in groups by delivery area, and then we give them to the bike guys to deliver. This is much faster than our competitors’ one-off method, and it’s also good for you—you get to do more deliveries. We pay you a 50 percent commission, which at current rates is $1.75 per ticket.”
I perked up. A dollar-seventy-five per delivery? This could be good! In 1979, the minimum wage was $2.90 an hour, and I figured I could easily average more than two deliveries an hour making local drops around town.
“Finally,” Jay said, “we need a bike man at our 52nd Street office. I’ll give Al a call to tell him you’re going to be over there shortly. Here’s the address.” He handed me a slip of paper, and I was on my way.
Because I didn’t want to break the law on my very first day by going against traffic, I walked my bike over to Sixth Avenue and rode to the 52nd Street office, just off Madison Avenue.
When I walked in the door, a slim African American man, with glistening jet-black hair combed straight back, was barking out orders to the messengers. I soon learned that Al, the chief dispatcher, was a kind and patient man behind his harsh and strident demeanor. But it required a certain toughness to manage the variety of shady characters who worked as messengers, several of whom were only a step away from the gutter.
“You must be Jack,” Al said as soon as he saw me. “We desperately need a bike man. Our last guy, Pete, did not show up today, and he did not call. Probably drugs—I saw this coming. There’s just too much turnover with these bike guys.”
Al looked me over and asked, “How well do you know Manhattan?”
“Very well,” I answered truthfully. After all, I had explored almost the entire island on foot.
“We shall see.” Al pointed to a pile of six packages and letters and said, “These are all for the Upper West Side. Deliver them and come straight back.”
I stowed my freight in the messenger bag, threw it over my left shoulder, and joined the hustle and bustle of Manhattan traffic on my very first day of work as Jack Barsky, the American.
It being my first day, I rode very carefully, and it took me two hours to deliver all six packages. Still, when I returned to the office around noon, Al seemed pleased.
“Not bad. Here’s another pile—these are all East Side.”
By now it was lunchtime, and I was hungry and thirsty under the hot Manhattan sun. But stopping for an hour to eat and rest seemed like a bad idea. After all, there was work to be done and money to be made. So I worked right through the hunger, as I would for my entire time as a bike messenger.
At the end of the day, I counted eighteen tickets with my name on them. When I did the math, I turned a mental somersault. Eighteen times $1.75, and working five days a week, meant I’d make $157.50 a week. That was more than a dollar an hour above minimum wage.
I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. This was a livable wage, and with that income to supplement my stash from the Center, I would be able to rent an apartment and finally get out of that dreadful hotel.
When I arrived at the hotel that night, I was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and tired. But I was anything but miserable. I kicked off my shoes and tossed my empty messenger bag on the table, feeling ecstatic after my first day on the job.
After a month as a messenger, and with four paychecks deposited into a brand-new bank account, I started looking for an apartment. Like others who hailed from out of town and “had just jumped off a potato truck” I fell for a classic New York City scam. The pied-à-terre studio apartment on the Upper East Side that was advertised in the Sunday section of the Daily News seemed like a perfect fit.
After touring the marvelous apartment, I asked again if the advertised rent was correct. It seemed too affordable. My excitement grew when the agent confirmed the price. I had to have this place. It was the first slice of the good life in America, and it finally seemed to be within reach. In fact, it was almost too good to be true.
“This place will go fast,” the agent said. “I’ve already shown it to a few people who are trying to get it. But a $300 cash deposit will lock it in for you.”
I told him I had to get the money from the bank, and I hurried to my hotel room to retrieve the cash from my “bank,” the hiding place behind the fridge. I then rushed back uptown and handed over three freshly minted hundred dollar bills to make sure that no one else would beat me to the prize.
The next day, when I tried reaching the agency by phone, I couldn’t make a connection. When I went to the place the following weekend, it was empty. A few weeks later, the mystery was solved when I saw a local TV report about a group of scam artists who had used the very same apartment to collect thousands of dollars in cash “deposits” from gullible victims. Because I had plenty of cash reserves, the $300 loss didn’t hurt me as much as missing out on that apartment. I chalked it up to inexperience and learned a valuable lesson about capitalism: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
After searching for an apartment for weeks, I finally came to terms with the reality that Manhattan was not an option for me. To expand my search, I randomly picked a subway line—the #7 train, which connects Times Square with Flushing, Queens—and got off in Woodside at the 61st Street express station.
In the early 1980s, that section of Queens was a safe and clean lower-middle-class neighborhood in the midst of a transition from Irish/German to multiethnic. The real estate agent, who was just around the corner from the train station, wasted no time in showing me exactly what I was looking for—a small, fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in a four-family house on 39th Avenue, a five-minute walk from the subway station.
The landlord, an immigrant from Colombia, lived in one of the upstairs apartments with his wife and mother. My apartment was on the ground floor in the back, with windows facing a fenced-in yard. The dinette adjacent to the small kitchen was shielded completely from the window, providing me with a safe space where I could conduct my intelligence-related activities without having to worry about prying eyes from the outside.
Leaving the seedy hotel on the West Side and moving into an apartment was another big milestone in my efforts to fully establish myself in the United States. Not only was I joining the mainstream, with a steady income and a place of my own to live, but I was also able to enjoy some creature comforts.
So, how does a German starved for a home-cooked meal celebrate after moving into his first apartment in the US? Boiled potatoes, sausages, and butter. There was still a bit of homesickness in me after all.
The Center congratulated me on my achievements and advised me to continue in the bike messenger job for another nine months before embarking on the final step of my legalization—applying for a passport. Nine more months would take me right on through winter and up until the next summer—which meant the full gamut of New York weather. As satisfying as a good day on the bike could be, my handlers in the KGB did not quite understand how demanding, and sometimes even demeaning, this job was.
On a typical weekday, my alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. On days when it was raining or snowing, I really did not want to get up. But I would remind myself that if I didn’t show up in bad weather, they might not want me back when the sun came out. Besides, it was important to build a consistent work history so that whatever came next in the evolution of my undercover role, I could show potential employers that I could hold a job.
After hastily eating my cereal, I would layer on my work clothes for rainy weather: jeans, a flannel shirt, nylon jacket, rubber boots, and the final layer of protection: a yellow rubber rain suit, with pants and a jacket.
Next, I’d sling the waterproof messenger bag over my shoulder, roll my bike into the street, and climb awkwardly onto the saddle. The twenty-minute ride to Manhattan would take at least thirty minutes on those days, and the driving rain often hit me right in the face.
Al always gave me a great route, but even six deliveries in this weather would take me all morning. And though most people were happy to receive their packages, they were not necessarily happy to see me, dripping wet, step into their office or their home.
I’ll never forget the time I was picking up an envelope at Ronald Lauder’s residence on Park Avenue to deliver to the Estée Lauder offices on Fifth Avenue. When I stepped off the elevator, I was dazzled by all the pastel colors and the white carpet. That is, until the receptionist shrieked, “Do not come in here!”
She hurried over and very carefully removed the envelope from my outstretched, dripping hand, trying to avoid any contact with the dirty man from the street.
On another occasion, when I was making a delivery in the Garment district, the young receptionist who saw me walk in turned around and yelled to the back, “Christine, the messenger boy is here.”
I wanted to scream, Lady, you don’t have a clue who you just called a messenger boy!
Right then, I really yearned to be back in Germany, standing in a warm, dry lecture hall, teaching chemistry or math—or anything, for that matter. This spy stuff was not living up to its marquee billing.
Occasionally, a special package made the job more interesting. In addition to several pickups and deliveries at Ronald Lauder’s luxurious home, I once took some carpet samples to the residence of Jacqueline Onassis. On another occasion, I made a lunch delivery from the famous Russian Tea Room to Dustin Hoffman’s hospital room. (The Tea Room was Hoffman’s favorite restaurant, but they didn’t deliver.) But for all my time as a bike messenger, that’s as close as I got to moving and shaking with the upper crust of American society.
Even though the messenger job wasn’t exactly a great platform from which to conduct intelligence work, hanging out with the motley crew at the messenger office allowed me to gradually and safely integrate into American culture. The office was a safe haven where I was in the company of men at the fringes of society, who had no interest in finding out who I was, where I’d come from, or where I was going.
Despite my careful and defensive approach to New York traffic, I could not escape the fate of every bike messenger who works the job for any length of time: accidents.
I was involved in two serious accidents, and the first one almost ended my undercover operation altogether. In that instance, I crashed into a deep pothole in the middle of Madison Avenue, totaling my bike and escaping by inches from being run over by a truck.
The second accident was not life-threatening, but it had more serious, long-term consequences. I was sailing through an intersection on a green light when a beat-up old Buick made a left turn without looking for oncoming traffic. I crashed hard and immediately felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder.
After the police arrived and laid the blame squarely on the driver, I locked up my damaged bike and walked to the emergency room at nearby Cabrini Medical Center. The diagnosis was a dislocated right clavicle, as well as damaged ligaments and muscles at the back of my shoulder. Because I had no medical insurance, the doctor advised against expensive surgery of the kind that would typically be done only on high-performance athletes. He immobilized my right arm with a sling and advised me that I was likely to contract arthritis in that permanently dislocated joint later in life.
As I walked out of the hospital, still dazed from the experience, I had the sudden urge to light up a cigarette. So after six months of hard-fought abstinence, I joined the ranks of backslidden smokers.
For the next three weeks, I could not ride a bicycle, and being right-handed, I could not communicate with the Center through secret writing. Once I was able to explain the reason for my silence, it established a precedent for the comrades at the Center and helped them understand that there would be times when I would be nonresponsive for a valid reason. This unplanned silence, and the subsequent trust generated by the explanation, would later help me in ways I could not have imagined at the time.