Joseph Weisberg’s work for the CIA has been put to use in “The Americans,” which tells the story of two Russian spies living undercover in suburban Virginia in the 1980s.

When Joseph Weisberg was training to be a case officer for the CIA in the early 1990s, he soon learned that deception was a crucial skill, one that involved lying to his family on a regular basis.

“It was painful,” Weisberg recalled. “Fundamentally, lies were at the core of the relationships. I lied to all my friends and most of the people in my family. I lied every day. I told 20 lies a day and I got used to it. It was hard for about two weeks. Then it got easy. I watched it happen to all of us.”

So does he find it easy to tell lies now? “It’s had the opposite effect,” he said.

That experience, though, has been put to good use in the critically acclaimed FX show “The Americans,” of which Weisberg, 47, is the creator and head writer.

The show, which is shown Wednesday nights, tells the story of two Russian spies, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, living undercover in suburban Virginia in the 1980s, at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War. Their artful deceptions — a pretend marriage, made-up back stories, ever-changing identities, quick-shifting loyalties — are at the series’ core.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, in the writer’s room of a fifth-floor downtown Manhattan office that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, Weisberg recalled the episode in which Elizabeth, played with cool detachment by Keri Russell, pounded the face of her KGB boss with her bare fists after her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys), was accused of being a mole.

“Everyone watching went crazy,” Weisberg said. On Twitter, someone praised Russell’s ultra-aggressive demeanor. Weisberg shuddered with delight; the poster had picked up on the physical ferocity that Weisberg hoped appeared authentic in the show.

“I shouted, ‘KGB! KGB!’” he said, jumping to his feet, his two fists punching the air.

Joel Fields, a fellow writer for the show, looked on knowingly. “They tap into your Jungian self-consciousness,” he said of fans’ comments.

Weisberg nodded. “In the aggregate,” he said, “they are simply all the things in my brain.”

For those who suggest spy culture is a vestige of the past, Weisberg pointed out that, in 2010, federal prosecutors arrested 10 Russian agents living suburban lives (one couple grew hydrangeas in Montclair, N.J.), part of an espionage ring that, among other things, sought to recruit Americans.

“I feel close to all of them,” Weinberg said of the show’s main characters, including Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent who lives next door to the Jennings family and who seems alternately friendly and suspicious. “A lot of my life people told me I was stubborn and I know what that meant. But I wanted to be a positive, not a negative. I see that in Elizabeth. Philip has lightness and humor masking a lot of dark stuff, which is familiar to me. And I see Stan, who is confronted by so much stuff, having to make decisions, spiraling down.”

He paused. “I don’t feel like that now,” he said.

Weisberg came to New York in 1997 by way of Chicago, where he grew up in a liberal Jewish home. His father, Bernard, was a prominent civil rights lawyer, and his mother, Lois, a well-known social activist celebrated by the writer Malcolm Gladwell in a 1999 New Yorker article as a “connector” for her uncanny ability to navigate the city’s social strata.

In 1987, Weisberg graduated from Yale University, where he took classes in Russian history, having come of political age in an era when Reagan railed against Soviet-style communism. Three years later, he joined the CIA and moved to Washington, because, he said, “I wanted a job where I could be a Cold Warrior,” adding, “where you can be a brainy, dark weirdo and do all kinds of fascinating crazy stuff.”

In 1993, Joe Weisberg took a leave of absence before his first foreign assignment and moved back to Chicago to take care of his ailing father. Disillusioned by then with spy work, he decided not to return to the CIA after his father died the following year.

He wanted to write fiction, and supported himself by teaching after moving to New York City. He also wrote country songs that he implored friends to watch him perform in local bars.

He was married in 2005 to Julia Rothwax, who works in public relations; they have a daughter, and he has written two novels, including “An Ordinary Spy,” inspired by his work at the CIA.

“There is a mystery to Joe,” said Peter Jacobson, an actor and one of his closest friends, whom he met in 1974. “He is funny, nice and fun to be with, but there is an underside. He was able to hide that in the CIA.”

That underside proved lucrative in the creation of “The Americans,” which has been picked up for a second season, and a boon to the actors who receive lessons from Weisberg in countersurveillance. Rhys said Weisberg spent an afternoon explaining, among other things, how to hide behind buildings when trying to evade capture. They ventured onto the streets of Brooklyn, where Weisberg taught Rhys how to determine if he was being followed. One technique: cross a street, which allows a look around without suspicion.

“You can look two or three times if you know how to do it well,” Rhys said.