AFTER RETURNING TO THE US, I started my professional career on the first Tuesday of September 1984. The concept of “business casual” had not yet been adopted by the insurance industry. So, prior to my trip to Europe, I had bought three suits, half a dozen dress shirts and ties, and a pair of Bally shoes.
For a former bike messenger, who had not yet cashed his first paycheck, I was overdressed, but this was not enough of a misstep to raise the curiosity of my new bosses and coworkers.
The insurance industry was on the eve of a radical transformation, fueled by information technology and aided by automation. In the past, armies of claims adjusters, sitting behind desks in neatly arranged rows, had toiled away, analyzing, approving, or rejecting claims. Now they were about to be replaced by a much smaller number of knowledge workers who delegated the routine aspects of data processing to the computers.
When I joined the company, the floor layout still reflected the paper-based tradition. I shared a desk with a fellow named Felix, a middle-aged senior programmer with dark, curly hair and a sharp nose. To my surprise, he spoke with a Russian accent.
“Are you Russian?” I asked.
“No, I am Ukrainian, and I hate everything Russian.”
That was a strong answer, but very much reflective of the historic hostility between the two nations.
“So how do you like working here?” I asked.
Felix looked up from his stack of computer printouts and answered with a smirk. “Sometimes I feel like a slave. They work you hard, and when things go wrong at night, they have no problem waking you up. Get ready for a rough ride.”
He was certainly not a happy camper.
Later, I sat down in the terminal room to sign on to my account for the first time. The man to my right turned and smiled. “Hi, my name is Joe. Welcome to MetLife!”
Joe was a well-groomed, perfectly dressed gentleman. His black hair and dark eyes reflected his southern European ancestry, but he spoke without an accent.
After telling him my name, I repeated the question I’d asked Felix. “So what is it like to work here?”
“Oh, this is a great place. We’re working on the biggest medical claims system in the country, and we have all the resources needed to do a good job. And they treat us so well.”
“But what about the night calls?” I asked.
“That comes with the territory,” Joe responded with an ear-to-ear grin.
Joe turned out to be of Sicilian descent. He and Felix were among quite a number of immigrants and first-generation Americans on the team of about fifty information technology professionals—a reflection that computer work was the fastest avenue to success for smart people from other parts of the world.
There was Gerard, a Cuban, and one of the smartest individuals I’ve ever met; Savely, an equally smart Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union; Olga, a former Russian schoolteacher; Bob, a highly capable immigrant from Hong Kong; Rufus, from the small island of Saint Kitts in the Caribbean; and José, a Spaniard who was as smart as he was droll. And then, of course, there was an East German Soviet spy masquerading as a full-blooded American. The only real American in the gang I socialized with was Patrick, who is still a good friend today.
One day, I was sitting next to Joe, typing some computer commands into the mainframe, when the far door was flung open and a short fellow with disheveled hair and wire-frame glasses walked in. He picked up an ashtray full of butts, threw it on the floor with a curse, and stormed back out.
“Don’t mind him. That’s just Ron, acting out. He is a bit odd, but boy, his code is out of this world.”
This was my kind of crowd—intelligent, full of energy, and just a little odd. The terminal room, where we had access to the mainframe, had an atmosphere of camaraderie, and friendly insults flew back and forth to break the tension. On my second day, Joe looked at me, smiled, and said, “That’s a very nice tie you have on. How many polyesters gave their lives to make that one?”
I quickly embraced the culture and soon was able to trade insults with the best of them. Within six months, I had mastered the learning curve and was able to produce functioning programs. I loved the opportunity to create something from nothing by stringing together logical thought.
It didn’t take long for me to see a wide gap between the Communist saga of the exploited worker in a capitalist society and the reality as I experienced it. For some reason, insurance companies were always near the top of the list of capitalist villains in Communist propaganda. But I never felt I was being exploited. Instead, I was quite comfortable in my job, everyone treated me well, and the paternalistic culture of the traditional mutual insurance company was very appealing to my statist roots. The chinks in my ideological armor began to grow into wide-open cracks, and I sensed that it would be difficult to walk away from this job when the time came.
While my job at MetLife was both demanding and fulfilling, it had another interesting effect on me as well. Slowly—and barely perceptibly to me—it began to turn my value system upside down. At first, it was more of an attitude shift than anything else. Instead of feeling that the demands of my job interfered with my intelligence-gathering activities, it seemed that the intelligence activities interfered with my job and my life as an American.
On Thursday nights when the radiograms exceeded two hundred groups in length, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning deciphering the messages. On top of that, creating and mailing letters with secret writing every two or three weeks had also become a burden. Having to write the open letters was tedious enough, but it took an additional hour to create the invisible writing on the message to be mailed, and then there was all the cleanup—all working papers had to be destroyed. Finally, the rules stipulated that I go on a three-hour route to check for surveillance before dropping the letter in a mailbox in the vicinity of the fictitious return address.
Another burden was the requirement that I submit an expense report every two months. The KGB was very meticulous in their desire to account for all expenses. They paid for my car and my rent, plus all my medical and travel expenses, and 50 percent of my auto expenses. They also continued to pay me a monthly salary of $600. With the salary I earned at my job, there was no longer a need for an infusion of extra cash. As a result, the balance in my account with the KGB swelled to more than $60,000.
With the demands of my daytime job and nighttime intelligence work, I felt I had no choice but to prudently cut some corners. I started writing my secret letters on Sunday afternoons and holding them overnight (against the rules). And then I skipped the surveillance check and deposited the letters in the mail chute at one of the older office buildings that had such a facility. I perfected a system to ensure there was no chance that anyone could have seen me make the mail drop, even if I was under surveillance.
Another shortcut was the elimination of the routine monthly check for surveillance. I decided that two signals in my apartment would be sufficient to alert me to the possibility of being under investigation.
The first hot spot was a drawer in my living room chest, which I left open exactly 4 mm. That gap was measurable only from below and it would be invisible in a routine inspection. It was highly unlikely that even a well-trained operative would spot this trap.
The second sensor was a hair that I glued very lightly to the underside of another drawer. One would have to know where to look to find that hair. If the drawer was opened, the hair would come unglued and drop down.
Some of my corner cutting was the result of an increasing—and possibly false—sense of security. My rationale was that I wasn’t engaged in any activity that would have triggered a law enforcement investigation.
Without a doubt, my most vulnerable moments were the dead-drop operations. With these, I still took more elaborate precautionary measures. But, even then, I was looking for ways to reduce the time the operation took. For example, I devised what I thought was a brilliant method of shaking a tail. I loaded my bicycle into the trunk of my car and drove to a park at the outer edge of the city. Then I rode the bike to a street on the other side of the park, locked the bike near a train station, and continued onto the subway. This combination of moves, which was also part of my emergency escape plan, made it next to impossible for anyone to follow me.
Despite the constraints imposed by my “above cover” life, I managed to produce some value for the Soviets. In addition to portraying at least one new contact per letter to the Center, I continued to provide reports on “the mood of the American public.” I imagine they used this type of report to flesh out the briefings they gave to various decision makers.
One spring day, I arrived at my apartment and froze when I opened the door. Inside, I saw clear evidence that someone had been there. Cautiously, I walked inside and surveyed the damage. My belongings were strewn all over the floor, my clothes were tossed on the bed, and some drawers had been removed from a chest with their contents poured out on the floor.
When I went back into the living room, I realized that my new state-of-the-art stereo system was gone. As I continued to check the apartment, I realized that the thieves had entered through the living room window, which faced a fenced-in backyard. All signs pointed to a hurried search for valuables and a quick getaway. They hadn’t found my hidden cash or the expensive tennis bracelet I was going to take to Gerlinde, but of course both my markers had been disturbed.
There was always the possibility that the break-in was staged to cover up a search by the FBI. But a footprint left by one of the intruders and a half-eaten cup of yogurt that was spilled on the carpet led me to believe that it was a real burglary.
Not taking any chances, I left the apartment immediately for a three-hour surveillance-detection run. But nobody was following me, so I slept safe and sound that night. When I reported the break-in to the Center, I noted that I saw no reason for concern.
But Moscow wasn’t so easily convinced.