Are there really sleeper agents

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From our Obsession. Media are best understood as a competition for attention on internet-connected screens. Phones, tablets, laptops, monitors, TVs—it's all just glass. It's no secret that the Russians have long tried to plant "sleeper agents" in the US - men and women indistinguishable from normal Americans, who live - on the surface - completely normal lives.

But what happens when one of them doesn't want to go home? His name is on the passport of the man sitting before me now - a youthful year-old East German, born Albert Dittrich. The passport is not a fake. The story of how this came to be is, by Barsky's own admission, "implausible" and "ridiculous", even by the standards of Cold War espionage. As far as anyone can tell, it is all true. It began in the mids, when Dittrich, destined at the time to become a chemistry professor at an East German university, was talent-spotted by the KGB and sent to Moscow for training in how to behave like an American.

His mission was to live under a false identity in the heart of the capitalist enemy, as one of an elite band of undercover Soviet agents known as "illegals". This "idiotic adventure," as he now calls it, had "a lot of appeal to an arrogant young man, a smart young man" intoxicated by the idea of foreign travel and living "above the law". Dyson, who had travelled via Belgrade, Rome, Mexico City and Chicago, "immediately vanished into thin air", having served his purpose.

And Dittrich began his new life as Jack Barsky. He was a man with no past and no identification papers - except for a birth certificate obtained by an employee of the Soviet embassy in Washington, who had kept his eyes open during a walk in the Mount Lebanon cemetery. He also had a "legend" to explain why he did not have a social security number. He told people he had had a "tough start in life" in New Jersey and had dropped out of high school.

He had then worked on a remote farm for years before deciding "to give life another chance and move back to New York city". He rented a room in a Manhattan hotel and set about the laborious task of building a fake identity. Over the next year, he parlayed Jack Barsky's birth certificate into a library card, then a driver's licence and, finally, a social security card.

But without qualifications in Barsky's name, or any employment history, his career options were limited. Rather than rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons of American society, as his KGB handlers had wanted, he initially found himself delivering parcels to them, as a cycle courier in the smarter parts of Manhattan. So for the first two, three years I had very few questions that I had to answer.

The advice from his handlers on blending in - gleaned from Soviet diplomats and resident agents in the US - "turned out to be, at minimum, weak but, at worst, totally false", he says.

One of the things I was told explicitly was to stay away from the Jews. Now, obviously, there is anti-Semitism in there, but secondly, the stupidity of that statement is that they sent me to New York. Barsky would later use his handlers' prejudices and ignorance of American society against them.

But as a "rookie" agent he was eager to please and threw himself into the undercover life. He spent much of his free time zig-zagging across New York on counter-surveillance missions designed to flush out any enemy agents who might be following him. He would update Moscow Centre on his progress in weekly radio transmissions, or letters in secret writing, and deposit microfilm at dead drop sites in various New York parks, where he would also periodically pick up canisters stuffed with cash or the fake passports he needed for his trips back to Moscow for debriefing.

He would return the to the East every two years, where he would be reunited with his German wife Gerlinde, and young son Matthias, who had no idea what he had been up to. They thought he was doing top secret but very well-paid work at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Barsky's handlers were delighted with his progress except for one thing - he could not get hold of an American passport. This failure weighed heavily on him. On one early trip to the passport office in New York an official asked him to fill out a questionnaire which asked, among other things, the name of the high school he had attended.

Terrified that his cover might be blown, he scooped up any documents with his name on them and marched out of the office in a feigned temper at all this red tape. Without a passport, Barsky was limited to low-level intelligence work and his achievements as a spy were, by his own account, "minimal". He profiled potential recruits and compiled reports on the mood of the country during events such as the downing of a Korean Airlines flight by a Soviet fighter, which ratcheted up tensions between the US and the Soviet Union.

On one occasion, he flew to California to track down a defector he later learned, to his immense relief, that the man, a psychology professor, had not been assassinated. He said a foreign intelligence service sent a "sleeper" agent to Australia, who lay dormant for many years and quietly built community and business links, while secretly maintaining contact with his offshore handlers. The agent started feeding his spymasters information about expatriate dissidents in Australia, which directly led to harassment of them and their relatives overseas.

Regardless, the threat is real and the threat is extremely serious. Mr Burgess said ASIO has also uncovered cases where foreign spies have travelled to Australia with the intention of setting up sophisticated hacking infrastructure targeting computers containing sensitive and classified information.

While foreign interference was a growing issue, Mr Burgess confirmed Australia's terrorist threat was still sitting at "probable", and will remain "unacceptably high for the foreseeable future".

He revealed an Australian earlier this year was stopped from leaving the country to fight with an extreme right wing group on a foreign battlefield after authorities received a tip-off from ASIO. Sleeper agents are popular plot devices in fiction, in particular espionage fiction and science fiction. In espionage, a sleeper agent is one who has infiltrated into the target country and had 'gone to sleep', sometimes for many years.

That is, he or she does nothing to communicate with his or her sponsor nor any existing agents, nor to obtain information beyond that in public sources. They can also be referred to as 'deep cover' agents. They acquire jobs and ppp—ideally ones which will prove useful in the future—and attempt to blend into everyday life as normal citizens. Counter-espionage agencies in the target country cannot, in practice, closely watch all of those who might possibly have been recruited some time before.

In a sense, the best sleeper agents are those who do not need to be paid by the sponsor as they are able to earn enough money to finance themselves.

This avoids any possibly traceable payments from abroad. In such cases, it is possible that the sleeper agent might be successful enough to become what is sometimes termed an ' agent of influence '.