I Was a Landlord to a Russian Spy, and He Was a Total Slob

The slightly dilapidated red-brick Rahill apartments, where I live, occupy a prime tract of Arlington, VA, real estate just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The National Mall is a short bike across the Roosevelt Bridge; Georgetown is an even shorter walk across the Key Bridge going north. Despite the proliferation of swank townhomes and high-rise condominiums mushrooming up all around my building, there is still a clear view from my third-floor window of the Washington Monument and, beyond that, the U.S. Capitol.

So coveted is this address that when I used Craig's List to find someone to sub-let my apartment last year, I was inundated with phone calls from interested parties within an hour of placing the ad. Fatefully, I rejected the flood of Craig's List candidates and instead went with word of mouth to locate a tenant. A Russian acquaintance who was running a local travel agency recommended to me a friend of his who was planning to move to the area. That friend was Mikhail Semenko (pron. Sem-YEN-ko), a 27-year-old student working on his master's degree in international relations at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. In less than a year, Semenko would be charged, convicted and deported for the crime of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

Who'd-a-thunk? At the time, the unassuming Semenko seemed like salt of the earth, and a perfect fit for my apartment. Arlington leads the nation in well-educated twenty-somethings who wear their baseball caps backwards and start sentences with the word "dude." This trendy young Russian would be right at home. I went to Iraq to teach at a nascent American university, with utter confidence that my hovel would survive the spate of keggers my tenant was likely to host.

This was not my first experience teaching overseas, or entrusting my property to someone else for an extended period of time. In 1999, a decade prior to going to Iraq, I made the mid-life-crisis decision to trade in an insurance career for something slightly more meaningful, which is to say anything else. The notion of joining Peace Corps occurred to me as out-of-the-blue as any thought I've ever had. I went to Peace Corps headquarters on Wilson Blvd. in Arlington and asked if they had need of a bored, guilt-ridden insurance man. My hope was to get assigned an adobe hut somewhere in central Africa and begin my second career as a gruel ladler in abject, self-abnegating style. It would be the perfect penance for all those years reposing behind a desk and perfunctorily denying claims by phone.

Peace Corps, however, had a different plan for my life, one that would eventually culminate in the June 28, 2010 search and seizure by federal investigators of my home. Terry, my Peace Corps program coordinator, had just finished a two-year stint in the Primorsky Krai region of the Russian Far East and recommended it highly. Primoria, just above North Korea, is blisteringly cold and relatively desolate. But the rewards of working there, Terry assured me, were vast. All the volunteers dispatched to Primoria were provided host families to facilitate cultural assimilation, and trained to work as English teachers. They served at secondary schools and universities that wanted an American on their teaching staff. A sizable percentage of those volunteers worked in Vladivostok, the capital of Primoria and home to Russia's Pacific naval fleet.

At 40, I had never traveled outside the United States, unless you count a brief road-trip to Canada. The idea of spending two years getting mocked by impudent Russian kids in an unheated, Soviet-era classroom terrified me. But continuing a pointless existence as a desk jockey terrified me even more. I asked Terry for an application. At his behest, I wrote a one-page Mission Statement that outlined my personal plan for helping Russia out of its economic funk by creating lessons with "can do" messages. Since I knew absolutely nothing about Russia, economics, or creating lessons, I kept my statement nice and vague. It could have been distilled down to four words: "Caring is the answer." Terry ate it up. I was in.