flares to indicate request for help. He asked the only other Lithuanian crew member Jurgis Kryžiokas into a lifeboat and sailed about to the shore. They were met by coastguards. Pleškys indicated that he wanted to defect and asked for political asylum and suggested Kryžiokas do the same, but he refused. The next day, three Swedish ships escorted Smolny to Slite. Personnel of the Russian embassy, including military attaché , arrived to deal with the matter. The crew discovered that Smolny's compass and navigational charts were destroyed. The vessel was assigned a new captain and departed Gotland on April 8. In neutral waters, Smolny was met by a Soviet minesweeper which replaced the entire crew of Smolny and returned the vessel to Liepāja. Later life The military tribunal of the Baltic Fleet sentenced Pleškys in absentia to execution on August 29, 1961. He spent the rest of life afraid that the KGB was coming after him. Pleškys was picked up by the CIA and debriefed to ensure that he was not a double agent working for the KGB. What is known about his later life is still very fragmentary as CIA files concerning Pleškys remain classified. Eventually, he received a U.S. passport under the name Jonas Plaskus. At various times, he was at a submarine repair docks, taught basics of computer programing at the University of Washington, worked at a bank in San Francisco. In 1968, he enrolled into the International Language School to study Spanish. There he met Laura Cajas de Martinez and they married the same year. They had daughter Jennifer Plaskus and the marriage lasted five years. For five years, he traveled to various countries. In 1972–1973, he worked under contract with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Guatemala and Costa Rica. He briefly returned to the United States and worked as a computer programmer. In 1979, he disappeared and spent three years growing his own food and living in a remote cabin in Mexico. According to his biographer Marijona Venslauskaitė-Boyle, it was the only place where he felt safe from the KGB. In 1986, Pleškys returned to the United States and got a job as a systems management specialist with the American President Companies in Oakland. In 1988, he met his sister actress Eugenija Pleškytė in Houston when she toured with her theater troupe. The KGB approved her travels hoping they could track