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 enmeshed 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.
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.