They Came To Spy On America. They Stayed To Coach Little League.

At 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1989, San Francisco began to shake. The Loma Prieta earthquake caused widespread destruction. Across the region, freeways and buildings collapsed. When the dust settled, 63 people were killed and over 3,700 injured.

A local FBI counterintelligence agent had left work early and was with his kids at a city park when the quake struck. Unnerved but unharmed, the FBI agent quickly dropped off his kids at home, then jumped into his bureau car and sped downtown. Apocalyptic reports wafted over the car radio: Part of the Bay Bridge had collapsed. Buildings were ablaze. It was chaos.

When he got to FBI headquarters, he was told to check on a small, nondescript, two-unit home in San Francisco’s foggy Outer Sunset District, close to the chilly Pacific. The agent drove all the way across town to a quiet block in one of the quietest corners of the city.

The house was still standing. There was no damage. And because there was no damage, the tenant of the in-law unit — an ultra-deep-cover, Soviet bloc spy — would remain oblivious to all the secret FBI surveillance concealed inside his apartment: the bugs recording his every utterance, the video cameras covertly tracking his every move. The FBI’s operation against this deep-cover spy remained hidden, at least for now.

But not for long.

Revealed here for the first time, this tale of a Czech spy — based on conversations with nine former FBI and CIA officials, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive counterespionage operations — would help spark a burst of intense intelligence diplomacy at a moment when the United States and Europe, particularly the lands under Soviet imperium, were fundamentally reevaluating their relationships and coming together as never before. (Former FBI officials who spoke to POLITICO Magazine, some of whom recounted detailed interactions and conversations between bureau agents and the deep-cover spy, declined to provide the name of the Czech operative.)

Today, the U.S.’s closest allies speak of an irrevocable rupture with Washington. This is a story about another, older America — a superpower capable of restraint in victory. Even, one might say, grace for its ostensible enemies: former Soviet-bloc spies embedded across the country, some of whom blended in so well they became the Americans they sought to imitate.

“I remember the case, and I remember the guy,” said former FBI counterintelligence agent Bill Kinane. The deep-cover operative lived out by the beach and worked in a hotel downtown, recalled Kinane, who was the chief of the FBI’s eastern bloc squad in San Francisco when the bureau launched its investigation in the late 1980s, and thus directly oversaw the probe. (An FBI spokesperson declined to discuss the case of the Czech spy but underscored the bureau’s leadership role in “government-wide efforts in preventing, investigating and exposing foreign intelligence activities on U.S. soil.”)

The eastern bloc squad was responsible for tracking spies from Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, East Germany, Hungary — and Czechoslovakia, from which this secret operative hailed.

Like other Warsaw Pact services, Czech intelligence was ultimately subordinate to Moscow. But the Czechs were considered particularly adept antagonists. Their spy agencies hewed closely to the KGB, and their intelligence officers were tough to recruit. (The Czech embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment about the San Francisco-based spy or broader Czech intelligence operations on U.S. soil during the Cold War.)

The Czechs were “a very hard-hatted, tough adversary,” said David Manners, the CIA’s top officer in Prague at the end of the Cold War. “We did not have a great deal of success against them over the years.” (The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Indeed, Prague had notched notable victories against U.S. intelligence over the years. In 1965, it sent two deep-cover operatives, Karel and Hana Koercher, to the U.S. to steep themselves in American culture.

In 1972, Karel Koercher successfully found work as a CIA contractor — the only known instance of a foreign deep-cover spy successfully burrowing into the agency. The KGB eventually took direct control over the Koerchers’ case from its Czech auxiliaries.

The Koerchers were suave, high-society types who ran in partner-swapping swingers circles — even attending sex parties with other CIA and U.S. government officials, whose names the Koerchers duly passed to the KGB. The Koerchers were arrested by the FBI in 1984. Karl Koercher eventually pleaded “no contest” to espionage charges and was sentenced to time served shortly before he and his wife were traded in a spy swap in Berlin a few years after the arrest.

Czech spies were resourceful and committed, and U.S. intelligence knew it. Throughout the Cold War, recalled Ed Appel, a former senior FBI counterintelligence official, “there were several instances where sons or daughters of people that we had identified in the past ... as being associated with the Czech intelligence services found their way to the United States and applied for jobs in the intelligence community,” including the FBI, CIA and Defense Department. U.S. counterspies believed the young adults had “been directed” to get a job within the U.S. national security bureaucracy to work as potential deep-cover spies, said Appel.

So when Kinane and his San Francisco-based FBI colleagues received information that there was a deep-cover Czech operative in their backyard, they had to take it seriously. Who knew what his espionage activities entailed, or what his ultimate mission could be?

The fact that they had this information at all was an intelligence coup. It had been passed to the bureau by the CIA, which itself received the information via a small European country’s intelligence service. “I’m sure he was given up by some defector or something, because otherwise how would we have known about it?” said Kinane. “Cause he was living here, like an ‘illegal.’”

In the world of espionage, “illegals” is a term of art. It refers to the deepest-cover type of intelligence officer, who has no official relationship with the government for which he or she secretly works. While many spies operate under what’s known as “legal” or “official” cover, stationed as diplomats or military attaches — or even embassy support staff like cooks or custodians — so-called “illegals” are, at least formally, completely untethered from their country’s government.

In fact, “illegals” often assume entirely new identities and nationalities while undertaking their spying. Like the fictional Russian operatives in the FX series The Americans, they can spend years, often decades, integrating themselves into their target countries — having families, building careers and cultivating wholly new lives for themselves, all while secretly working for their home country.

Because San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley were home to a burgeoning tech scene, key military installations and important figures in politics and academia, they were top targets for Moscow and its allies’ emplacement of these deep-cover “illegals.” “If you’re talking about the ‘illegal’ networks for the USSR — and, by extension, any of the Warsaw Pact intel services — San Francisco always came up” in discussions at the CIA, recalled Milt Bearden, who served as the chief of the agency’s Soviet-East European Division from 1989 through 1991.

If they’re exposed, “illegals” — unlike their colleagues working under so-called “official cover” at embassies — lack any diplomatic protections, meaning they can be prosecuted or worse. Their jobs are immersive, all-encompassing, inherently isolated and potentially very dangerous.

For professional spy hunters, uncovering an “illegals” network is the Holy Grail, because these operatives are so hard to identify, since they can burrow so deeply into their target countries over such long periods, often with elaborate fake identities and backstories.

So, in the late 1980s, when the CIA alerted its San Francisco-based FBI counterparts that the agency had a deep-cover spy in the bureau’s backyard, the bureau sprang into action, recalled six former FBI agents. It wiretapped the Czech’s phone lines at his San Francisco apartment. It installed secret cameras. It had bureau agents surreptitiously surveil his every move.

But the bureau went further than traditional — if certainly invasive — surveillance. Working with the building’s landlord, the FBI placed an undercover, San Francisco-based counterintelligence agent in a rental unit neighboring the Czech spy’s own flat. For over a year, this FBI agent lived under a fake name, with a fake job and a fake life story, and befriended his neighbor, the deep-cover spy. The two men, both in their 30s, would ride bikes around San Francisco together and go out for beers. “We were all over that case,” said David Major, a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent. “Absolutely all over it.”

The deep-cover Czech spy was also living under an assumed identity. But until the CIA’s tip to the FBI, his cover story had been plausible enough to otherwise escape scrutiny. According to his fake identity — or “legend,” in spy-speak — the man was ethnically Czech but had been born in a South American country after his parents had emigrated there. When the spy was still a child, the story went, his parents had returned to Czechoslovakia, with their son now a citizen of this South American country.

But some tragedy eventually befell them, according to the legend, and the boy lost his parents. Later on, the young man said he escaped the Iron Curtain — probably thanks to his South American passport — made it to a refugee camp in Europe and eventually settled in San Francisco.

Now, this spy was living the life of a younger single man in the city, working as a doorman at the now-shuttered Savoy Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square area. He had an American girlfriend, who was blissfully ignorant of her beau’s true identity. He even took a dream vacation to Hawaii.

As far as actual spying went, though, the Czech operative didn’t seem to be doing much. But that, FBI officials knew, wasn’t all that unusual. “He was in the process of becoming who he was supposed to become,” said a former FBI agent with knowledge of the case.

Many deep-cover spies spend years immersing themselves in the societies they’re targeting before undertaking any substantial espionage, like meeting with local agents or transmitting sensitive intelligence back to their overseers abroad. Even then, some are held in reserve in sleeper cells in case, say, a hot war breaks out. Just because this Czech operative wasn’t doing any demonstrable spying yet didn’t mean he wasn’t considered a major investment by the Soviet bloc — and an important target for San Francisco-based FBI spy hunters.

“I used to say this about ‘illegals’: They had very sharp teeth, but very short tails,” said former FBI agent Major. “There’s a lot of things they couldn’t do. But what they could do, they could be very damaging.”

Still, FBI agents didn’t have strong, independent proof — beyond that CIA tip — that the Czech doorman was truly a spy.

Until, one day, they did.

The FBI’s surveillance operation took a lot of manpower, and one rookie San Francisco-based FBI agent was assigned to review the surveillance footage of the suspected Czech spy’s apartment. It was tedious work: There were countless hours of recordings, with very little action. The footage was “hundreds of hours of nothing,” recalled a second former bureau agent who helped on the case.

Then, one day in 1989, the FBI agent watched some new tape. In it, the Czech came home from work and sat down in his La-Z-Boy with a boombox on his lap. He unscrewed the back of the radio and extended some antennas. It was a shortwave radio receiver.

He turned the box on. Digitally coded transmissions poured from its speakers.

The bureau agent understood what he was witnessing. Even today, some spy services still use these “numbers stations,” as they’re called, to transmit messages across the globe. While the transmissions themselves aren’t secret — amateur shortwave radio aficionados can pick them up — the messages are encrypted. Only someone with the proper codebook can decipher them.

The FBI agent reviewing the footage shouted in elation, sending bureau spy hunters scurrying to his workstation. They watched the tape over again.

There was no doubt now, if there ever was: This was a deep-cover intelligence officer working for the Soviet bloc.

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, FBI spy hunters in San Francisco puzzled over how to approach the Czech operative. Should they arrest him? Seek to “turn” him as a U.S. intelligence source? Not all eastern bloc spies were so quick to embrace the West; there were true believers among them. Even if this Czech operative was out in the cold, it didn’t mean he’d stop spying — or be amenable to FBI recruitment.

In late 1989, three FBI agents working the case, including the undercover bureau agent living in the Czech’s building, drove up to a cabin in Lake Tahoe for a weekend-long summit on how they might best “pitch” the Czech operative to switch sides.

Fortunately for the bureau, the Czech had already been partially recruited — by San Francisco itself.

Amid this operative’s explorations of the city and Northern California more broadly, the FBI learned, he had begun to gravitate toward Eastern-inspired, New Age spiritual practices.

The Czech’s commute took him through San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, and he became tight with a New Age crowd, attending talks, lectures and spiritual meet-ups and becoming a devotee of these Eastern-infused practices. His girlfriend was into the New Age stuff, too. He “fell in love” with the New Age spiritual community once he got to San Francisco, said a third former FBI agent. “That was his social life.”

Some FBI agents working the case — who were a pretty-straight laced bunch, as bureau officials tend to be — were befuddled by the spy’s spiritual explorations. “They thought he was crazy,” recalled the same former FBI agent. “And then they just thought, ‘Well, he doesn't believe any of this stuff,’ because they didn’t believe it. Well, he was a true believer.”

The New Age talk was particularly perplexing for the undercover FBI agent who had moved into the same building as the Czech spy. The bureau counterspy was under “tremendous pressure” to keep up the ruse, but didn’t know how to engage the Soviet bloc “illegal” on his spiritual beliefs, which were a frequent conversation topic, recalled the same former bureau agent.

The sun was setting on the world of the Cold War. But for this spy, at least, it was also the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

“He was not a Putin, he was not a stone-cold intelligence officer,” said the third former FBI agent. “He was very impressionable.”

At their cabin confab at Lake Tahoe, the FBI agents concluded that if they were going to successfully recruit this Soviet bloc spy, they’d need to indulge, and not dismiss, his increasingly woo-woo spiritual explorations.

As the the Soviets’ grip on Eastern Europe began to crumble, the bureau determined it was time to strike. Officials wanted to use the case to help catalyze a final split between Prague and Moscow. “Things were happening very, very quickly,” said the first former bureau agent. “When that window opened, we wanted to jump through it as fast as we possibly could.”

Two FBI agents were dispatched to surprise the deep-cover spy at home in San Francisco. They didn’t know what kind of personality the Czech would respond to, so one agent dressed the part of the “boss”: freshly pressed suit, new shirt, new tie, polished shoes, new suitcase, stylish haircut.

The other agent, meanwhile, affected a more streetwise look, wearing a brown polyester suit with a yellow shirt and brown tie to give off “a rookie LA detective” vibe, recalled the first former bureau agent.

When the FBI men entered the Czech spy’s flat, the agent said, he was putting groceries in a Safeway bag down on his kitchen table. “We need to talk,” said one of the FBI agents.

“Can I finish putting away my groceries first?” asked the spy.

“Are they perishables?” retorted the FBI agent.

The two FBI agents didn’t want to linger in the operative’s home, so they walked him to a temporary safe house a few blocks from his apartment.

Bureau agents assembled exhibits proving his spying in case he was recalcitrant, but they needn’t have worried. The operative watched the news like everyone else; it was clear the Soviet bloc was disintegrating. “He saw the international implications of what was going on and what that would have to do with his career,” said the first former bureau agent.

The FBI, cognizant of the professional pride of intelligence officers, was careful to make clear that the spy hadn’t inadvertently outed himself. There were “other problems” within the Czech spy service that led to his discovery, the FBI told him. That “really pissed him off,” recalled the same former FBI agent.

But the Czech’s anger was directed at his communist spy bosses, not the FBI. He opened up about his background and spy training, holding little back.

That is, everything except one important detail. At first, the spy was “really, really uncomfortable” revealing his true name, recalled the former bureau agent. His intransigence sprang from personal, not professional, concerns: The Czech operative had become a spy to make his father proud, he told his bureau interrogators. Faced with an uncertain future — maybe even many years in an American prison — the spy was worried that, if he disclosed his name, his dad would be disappointed in him.

After hours of questioning at the safe house, one of the FBI agents looked at his watch and said, “It’s time for dinner.”

“C’mon,” he told the incredulous spy, “we’ve got reservations.”

Indeed, the FBI agents had made dinner arrangements. The three men drove to a fancy restaurant, sat down at a booth and ordered drinks. The nattily attired bureau man ordered a Vodka Gibson, ice-cold; the FBI agent affecting a more working-class mien asked for a bourbon on the rocks and a steak.

When the formally dressed spy hunter got up to make a phone call or go to the restroom, the spy turned to his more proletarian bureau minder and gave him a fraternal look.

“All bosses drink vodka,” he said.

At the end of the evening, recalled the first former FBI agent, the well-dressed spy hunter told the Czech: “Well, we’ll drop you at home now. You have to get ready for work tomorrow.”

He was speechless. It had to be some kind of trick.

But it wasn’t. The two bureau agents drove the spy back to his house near the beach and dropped him off for the night — under intensive surveillance, of course. The agents told him they’d continue talking the next evening, after work.

Early in the morning, the spy went to his doorman job downtown. As he walked inside the hotel, he spotted the elegantly dressed bureau man across the street. They nodded to each other.

That evening, amid another round of questioning, the spy had a bone to pick. The bureau had posted surveillance outside of the hotel to ensure that the operative didn’t try and escape. But the Czech spy mistakenly believed that everyone he had interacted with that day — including all the guests at the hotel — were undercover FBI agents.

“I know you guys are surveilling me all day long,” the first former agent recalled him saying. “You were all over the place. But by God, I make a living out here on tips, and you fucking cheap FBI agents stiffed me.”  

The days stretched on, and the debriefings continued. The spy poured out all he knew — and the information was valuable indeed, with the FBI harnessing it to undertake “an offensive operation overseas,” said the same former agent, who declined to elaborate on how the Czech’s information spurred a time-sensitive counterintelligence mission abroad.  

And this mission wasn’t just focused on the now-moribund Czech intelligence services. “The bureau ran into an interesting group of other people who were making sure that he was doing his job over here,” recalled a fourth ex-FBI agent. Some of those people, it seems, were working for the KGB. That meant the mission had expanded to target Moscow itself.

Even all these years later, former U.S. officials are tight-lipped on what precisely they discovered, though it seems to relate to a covert communications technique used by the Soviet intelligence services. “It really blew us away,” said the same former FBI official. “We caught them doing something that we had just simply never caught them doing before. To this day, they don’t really know how we put all this together and knew so much about what we knew.”

Meanwhile, the Czech spy was also focused on more quotidian concerns — like if the bureau could help provide him an excuse for his absence from work. FBI agents dutifully worked with him on a cover story for his bosses at the hotel.

“We didn’t demonize the guy,” recalled the first former FBI agent. The bureau wanted to keep the deep-cover operative talking — about his spying, absolutely, but also New Age philosophy, his hopes and dreams, anything that mattered to him. And that meant operating with a soft touch. He needed to believe he had a future.

Through these debriefings, the spiritually minded spy revealed himself as a very American sort of archetype: a pragmatic dreamer. He had become sublimated in a particular kind of West Coast culture, sitting at the nexus of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism and Bay Area hippiedom. “He didn’t run around in robes; he was very practical,” recalled the same former FBI agent. “He was business-oriented. He wanted to improve his life as best he possibly could.” And that, he understood clearly, now meant working with U.S. intelligence.

The Czech spy told bureau agents he knew he’d eventually be expelled from the country. But how soon, he asked, until he could possibly return?

In the very final days of 1989, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was reaching its culmination. Václav Havel, a famous Czech playwright, dissident and former political prisoner, was selected as the first president of the new post-communist Czechoslovakia.

Havel, who was considered by world leaders and his own countrymen to possess enormous moral authority, immediately began to clean house, firing diehard communists and appointing new, pro-democracy officials to key government positions — including in the country’s security apparatus.

For his new intelligence chief, Havel chose a man named Radovan Procházka. Like Havel, Procházka had a theatre background. But he was not your average thespian. As a young man, he had joined the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. He enlisted with the Czech military, but was arrested in the 1950s for anti-communist activities and spent over a decade rotting in prison. In other words, his anti-fascist and anti-communist credentials were impeccable.

Procházka, who died in 2020, was “a very decent man,” recalled Manners. “He had been abused in prison; he was a man who displayed a great deal of personal courage and valor in very difficult circumstances.”

In early 1990, Procházka traveled with Manners to Washington for meetings with senior U.S. intelligence and White House officials. Eastern bloc countries like Czechoslovakia said they wanted an entirely new sort of relationship with the U.S., but America’s spy chiefs weren’t going to just take their word for it. “They’re telling us they’re going to stop spying, but is there evidence that they’ve stopped spying?” said Major, the former senior FBI agent. The Americans wanted evidence — shows of good faith. And that, for the CIA and FBI, meant that folks like Procházka were going to have to bare all their secrets.

Unsurprisingly, part of the U.S.’s strategy was to spy on these services — including their visiting chiefs. “We did lots of different kinds of things … to find out what their services were doing,” said Major. “We would use wiretaps; we would do surveillances. We would do everything you can imagine that would indicate, ‘What do we know about [their] services?’”

When top former Warsaw Pact intel chiefs like Procházka would come to Washington, everyone present understood the historic — if anxious — nature of the meetings.

There was “a lot of emotion” at those summits, which felt like a “high-stakes poker game,” said Major. Top eastern bloc intelligence officials would visit FBI headquarters and sit around a large conference table with their bureau counterparts. For bureau officials, the question was: “Were they putting up their cards?” said Major. “They didn't know what we knew, so it was more difficult for them than it was for us.”

This was precisely the dynamic in those 1990 meetings between Procházka and U.S. officials. To kick-start a new relationship between U.S. and Czech intelligence — to prove that Prague was no longer controlled by Moscow — Washington demanded full disclosure: a list of every undercover Czech intelligence officer and source in the U.S., within its diplomatic facilities as well as outside of them. Including, of course, Prague’s deep-cover operatives.

Procházka and his team dutifully provided a list of undercover operatives to their interlocuters in U.S. intelligence. But there were some glaring omissions.

The deep-cover operative in San Francisco — as well as other U.S.-based Czech “illegals” known to the CIA and FBI — weren’t on the list.

The Czechs, it seemed, still wanted to hide some of their spies from the U.S.

Procházka was unaware that, by this point, FBI agents had already “turned” that San Francisco-based operative, recalled former FBI officials. He was also ignorant of how much U.S. counterspies knew from other sources about the larger Czech intelligence network stateside.

The timing “was all orchestrated,” said the first former FBI agent. U.S. intelligence officials “just wanted to see what happened first in San Francisco, and what happened in San Francisco gave them everything they were looking for.” Once the bureau got the SF-based “illegal” talking, “a lot of other things came crashing down across the country,” said the fourth former bureau agent, who declined to provide further detail.

Still, Procházka’s deceit produced a painful dilemma for U.S. officials. Why wasn’t he being forthcoming? Were the Czechs hedging their bets in a bid to straddle the Soviet bloc and Western powers? Should U.S. officials confront them, or just surveil the remaining U.S.-based Czech deep-cover spies?

“We were deciding how best to handle it,” recalled Manners, the former CIA official. But U.S. officials didn’t have the opportunity to formulate a response.

The Czech spy chief — still on that inaugural visit to America — did something that absolutely flabbergasted U.S. intelligence officials, both in its audacity and lack of basic espionage tradecraft: He personally telephoned all of the Czech “illegals” within the United States he could reach, instructing them to leave the country as soon as possible.

The mission was over. It was time to come home, Procházka told them.

The bureau was monitoring Procházka’s communications, and it now had smoking-gun confirmation of all the Czech deep-cover spies left in the U.S. — the spies that Procházka hadn’t disclosed. The Czech spy chief had tried to help his country’s operatives evade U.S. security officials. Instead, he had led U.S. spy hunters right to them.

Procházka’s shocking move forced U.S. intelligence to confront him. “We were in the difficult position where we had to go to Procházka and say, ‘Look, we know you called these people. We know who they are,’” recalled Manners. Procházka “immediately confessed,” Manners said.

It wasn’t that Procházka wanted to deceive the U.S. because he was pro-KGB — far from it — or that he wanted to keep some spies in reserve, in case U.S.-Czech relations again turned hostile. No, Procházka’s reasoning was more humane. He simply thought that these deep-cover spies — who, like the operative in San Francisco, had done very little actual spying — deserved to come home.

Procházka “said that these people hadn’t gone operational and hadn’t harmed us, and had embarked on a mission in good faith that they didn’t execute — and most didn’t have any intention of executing,” recalled Manners. “And he felt that they deserved a chance to come back home to Czechoslovakia, because he believed the FBI would just arrest them all and throw them in prison.” Procházka’s view was forged by the decade he spent as a prisoner of his country’s security services. He knew how punitive such institutions could be.

The FBI was indeed incensed — and hungry to make arrests. Agents swooped in to interrogate these deep-cover spies. But that produced some discomfiting revelations for the bureau. For example, it discovered that two Czech operatives in Boston had worked as hi-tech researchers — and previously received top-secret U.S. government security clearances. As far as the FBI could tell, these spies were inactive and hadn’t done any real work for Prague, but it was still unnerving.

Equally unnerving, and ultimately embarrassing for the bureau, were the undecipherable codebooks found littered around the home of one of these spies. “There were patterns of numbers and things like that that he kept that we would stumble across,” recalled the first former bureau agent. “And we couldn’t imagine why this guy was doing such crappy tradecraft.” But the FBI couldn’t crack the codes; they had never seen anything like them. They even brought in a team of bureau cryptologists to help with the effort.

The FBI was “frigging stumped,” said the same former bureau official. Until they realized that the Czech “illegal” was just an avid knitter. The codebooks weren’t codebooks, some “brilliant” new secret Soviet bloc commo device. They were leftover knitting patterns.

Clearly, the Czech spies in Boston — like their colleague in San Francisco — had settled in for the long term. Now, however, their new spy chief had called them home.

But for some of these deep-cover spies, the idea of “home” itself had become complicated.

During his discussions with U.S. intelligence officials, “Procházka came back [and] said, ‘What’s Little League?” recalled Bearden, the former top CIA operations official. “And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘One of our people won’t come back because he’s coaching Little League.’”

“I mean, how embedded can you be as an ‘illegal’ in the United States and end up coaching Little League baseball?”

The deep-cover spy-cum-Little League coach wasn’t even an exceptional case among the U.S.-based Czech “illegals.” “A lot of them didn’t want to go back,” Bearden said. “It wasn’t as if they’d all just salute and get on a plane and head back to Prague.”

Bearden and other U.S. intelligence officials didn’t believe there was much to be gained by taking an ultra-punitive approach toward these former eastern bloc spies — especially as many really didn’t do much, or any, actual intelligence work. They were “kind of the ‘flood-the-zone illegals,’ and some of them never got in a nickel’s worth of spying,” recalled Bearden.

The ideal solution, for Bearden and others, was to interview these spies — drain as much information from them as necessary — and deport them. “I probably didn’t see the need to throw everybody in the slammer,” said Bearden. “There were all kinds of American laws broken by [them] just coming here under those circumstances. But I wasn’t in any big hurry to see everybody arrested and thrown in jail.”

These Czech spies, however, had a different arrangement in mind. “I thought, you know, let them all go back home,” Bearden said. “But then that became the problem, because some of them really didn’t want to go.”

And so many lobbied to stay. They had built lives here, some over decades, and they had families, jobs, American citizenship, the whole package. “Don’t forget, a lot of them were here for a long time,” said Bearden. “They had kids, and what do you do, tell them, ‘We’re going to Prague?’ ‘Dad, where’s that?’”

Bearden and other American officials granted their wishes. Upward of a dozen were allowed to remain in the U.S. in their new, now true, lives. Presumably, they still reside in the states today, over 30 years later.

The Czech deep-cover spy in San Francisco, however, was not among those granted an opportunity to live permanently in the U.S. It’s unclear why.

When his long, detailed questioning by bureau agents ended, he was deported back to Prague. He would return, over the years, as a visitor — his FBI handlers made sure he was permitted to re-enter the country for commerce and pleasure— but settled in Europe, putting his English to good use in a career in international business.

During that initial expulsion, however, he traveled with an FBI escort from San Francisco to New York, and onward to Europe, according to the first former FBI agent, who was briefed on the trip. Waiting for his flight in San Francisco, the Czech “illegal” and the FBI agent looked out together at a sort of sculpture garden near the airport, which included a big piece of bent-up metal.

The bureau man turned to the spy and pointed at the sculpture. “You know,” he said, “you could make a lot of missiles out of that thing,” recalled the first former FBI agent.

The Cold War was dissipating into the historical ether — and Vladmir Putin was years away from materializing as the czar of a newly truculent Russia — but some, it seemed, were already dreaming about beating ploughshares right back into swords again.