I NEVER WOULD HAVE SOUGHT OUT a final assignment to wrap up the loose ends of my life. I was hoping that the process of becoming a legal US citizen would finally come to a close, but there was no urgency to that. Thoughts of returning to visit the country of my birth were no more than a fuzzy notion. Germany had become a foreign country to me, or so I had convinced myself.

But God decided to use Chelsea to crack open a door to the other side of the Atlantic. I had told her that she had a half-brother in Germany named Matthias. Sometime in 2009, and unbeknownst to me, she began a systematic Internet search to find him. For months and months, that search yielded nothing. But one day in the spring of 2010, I received a phone call from Chelsea.

“Hello?”

“I found him.”

“What? Found who?”

“Matthias, of course, and he’s coming to visit me in a month. He doesn’t want to see you, though.” Her voice tailed off with disappointment, but that was just fine with me. I wasn’t ready to burst the American bubble I had been living in for years and face the past—or the little boy I’d left behind in Germany.

But once Matthias was in the US, he changed his mind and told Chelsea, “I want to meet my father.”

On a Friday evening, Chelsea called and said, “Dad, Matthias and I are having dinner at the Clinton House, and we would like you to join us.”

Considering that the Clinton House was only three miles from my home at the time, a refusal to join them for dinner would have branded me a coward. Chelsea had forced my hand.

When I entered the restaurant, the two half-siblings were waiting for me near the entrance. Matthias just stared at me for a long time without saying a word. This was the oddest reception I had ever received from another human being. After we took our seats at the table and ordered our meals, we began to talk, and the initial awkwardness soon gave way to a free-flowing conversation—mostly in English, for Chelsea’s benefit, but also because Matthias’s English was much better than my rusty German. When our meal was finished, we decided to continue the conversation at my home.

There was only so much time we could spend on pleasantries and small talk before I had to address the most delicate issue between us—my choice. The unvarnished truth was that I had chosen one sibling over the other, and now they were both in my presence—one waiting for an explanation and the other a much interested audience.

I picked the only approach that I thought would resonate with Matthias, explaining to him the raw logic behind my thinking, namely that Chelsea needed my support much more than he did. He agreed. He told me that the KGB had taken good care of him and his mother while I was still in their employ. They hand-delivered my salary to Gerlinde until early 1990, more than a year after I cut ties with them. Matthias remembered at least two all-expense paid vacations with Gerlinde to Moscow and Yalta, a city on the Black Sea. Finally, and this was very important to me, when Matthias told me that the KGB had delivered my $60,000 bankroll to his mother, I was ecstatic. I saw it as yet another link in the chain of events that could only be held together by God’s protective hand.

When Matthias and I said good-bye, I felt a tenuous thread of hope that we might be able to build a relationship—something we’d never had. But with my application for US citizenship still stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire, some of that hope would have to be deferred. Still, I had my son back, thanks to Chelsea’s enterprising persistence.

It seemed that my paperwork had fallen down a rabbit hole somewhere in the offices of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Phone inquiries about the status of my application yielded no results, and even the FBI couldn’t get a straight answer. Like a page out of Franz Kafka’s The Castle—a tale of horror describing the frustrations of an individual in his dealings with a large faceless bureaucracy—this seemed to be a case of finding the right person who knew the right person who knew the right person. Had it not been for the unflagging efforts of my FBI liaison, to whom I am forever grateful, my papers might still be stuck in a bureaucratic graveyard, slowly taking on the yellowed look of ancient historical documents.

But on the morning of August 20, 2014, against all hope, I got The Phone Call at work.

“This is Officer Cahill from Homeland Security, the Albany office. Would you be able to come in tomorrow morning?”

The creature of habit in me responded, “Let me check my calendar.” Then it hit me: I had been waiting thirteen years for this moment!

“What am I saying? Of course I can come over. What time do you want me to be there?”

The next morning, I met Officer Cahill, who took my oath. Ten minutes later, I walked out a proud—and official—American citizen.

On my drive back to the office, I reflected on the circuitous journey I had taken to get here—from the little village of Rietschen in East Germany to Moscow, via Jena and Berlin, to my final home in the USA. What I had not expected was my emotional reaction. It felt really good to call a country my home again.

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 without 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.