Pleškys' mother died of tuberculosis in 1946, and his father married a woman who owned 40 hectares (99 acres) of land before the war.
[3] He received excellent grades, but was not admitted to the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute likely because his deported parents made him "politically unreliable".
[3] Pleškys briefly served in a submarine[6] before reassignment as captain to an auxiliary vessel collecting waste fuel from marine engines.
[3] On April 6, 1961, upon learning that his vessel would be transferred from Klaipėda to Paldiski in Soviet-occupied Estonia, Pleškys directed his barge Smolny north to dump the collected waste fuel in neutral waters of the Baltic Sea.
He asked the only other Lithuanian crew member Jurgis Kryžiokas into a lifeboat and sailed about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) to the shore.
Personnel of the Russian embassy, including military attaché Vitaly Nikolsky [ru], arrived to deal with the matter.
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.
From 1972 to 1973, he worked under contract with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Guatemala and Costa Rica.
[3] In 1986, Pleškys returned to the United States and got a job as a systems management specialist with the American President Companies in Oakland.
[1][5] Pleškys' defection was one of two incidents that inspired Tom Clancy in his writing of The Hunt for Red October.
[10] Pasmerktas myriop (Condemned to Death), a documentary about Pleškys directed by Henrikas Šablevičius [lt], was released in 1999.
[11] In 2005, Marijona Venslauskaitė-Boyle, who knew Pleškys in his last years, published Search For Freedom: The Man From Red October about his life.