IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR
WNINTEL
MOSCOW 2199
1.
FURTHER TO REF, CASE OFFICER PLIMPTON WAS ARRESTED 2130–2135 HOURS EVENING OF 13 JUNE WHILE ON THREE HOUR OPERATIONAL RUN TO MEET VANQUISH. NO SURVEILLANCE DETECTED AT ANY TIME DURING RUN. PLIMPTON DETAINED AND INTERROGATED FOR FOUR HOURS AT KGB CENTER AT LUBYANKA UNTIL CONSULAR ACCESS GRANTED 0230 HOURS AND PLIMPTON RELEASED AT 0430 HOURS.
2.
ARREST OF PLIMPTON APPEARED CHOREOGRAPHED WITH CAMERA ELEMENTS ALREADY IN PLACE, SUGGESTING COMPROMISE OF VANQUISH PROBABLY OCCURRED FAR ENOUGH IN RECENT PAST TO GIVE KGB AMPLE TIME TO SET UP AMBUSH. PLIMPTON DID NOT SEE VANQUISH AT THE SITE OF THE AMBUSH, THOUGH WHAT APPEARED TO BE VANQUISH’S CAR WITH MOSCOW LICENSE TAGS WAS PARKED NEARBY AS SAFETY SIGNAL.
3.
ANTICIPATE PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE WILL BE GIVEN USUAL FORTY-EIGHT HOURS TO DEPART THE USSR. WILL ADVISE TRAVEL DETAILS WHEN KNOWN.
4.
AMBASSADOR HAS BEEN BRIEFED. HE EXPECTS SUMMONS FROM FOREIGN MINISTRY LATER THIS MORNING TO BE ADVISED OF PNG ACTION AGAINST PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE.
5.
PLIMPTON SPOUSE REMAINED AT RENDEVOUZ SITE WAITING FOR PLIMPTON UNTIL 0115 HOURS. AT 0005 HOURS SHE NOTED GROUPS OF PEOPLE IN PARK OBVIOUSLY SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING OR SOMEONE. AT 0105 HOURS A SOVIET FEMALE APPROACHED PLIMPTON SPOUSE AND ASKED HER FOR DIRECTIONS TO LOCAL LIBRARY. PLIMPTON SPOUSE CORRECTLY DEDUCED THAT WOMAN WAS KGB AND THAT PLIMPTON HIMSELF HAD PROBABLY BEEN ARRESTED. SHE RETURNED HOME AT THAT TIME TO AWAIT PLIMPTON’S RETURN AT 0530 HOURS.
6.
DEBRIEFING OF PLIMPTON AND SPOUSE CONTINUES. WILL ADVISE BY SEPARATE CABLES ADDITIONAL OPERATION DETAILS PLUS INVENTORY OF CASH (RUBLES), CAMERAS, OPERATIONAL MATERIALS AND MEDICATIONS PLIMPTON CARRIED, ALL OF WHICH RETAINED BY KGB. END OF MESSAGE.
Gerber was still writing, and Redmond chose not to interrupt his train of thought. He glanced at the teak end table beside him. On it sat a farewell gift fashioned for Gerber by a CIA technical officer at the end of his stint as Moscow chief. A black steel tube bent into an elbow shape was mounted on a wooden base. Suspended by a beaded chain from the elevated end of the elbow was a black glass sphere. Redmond knew the message behind the odd creation: The outline of the steel elbow and dangling chain was suggestive of a taw, the twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
GTTAW was the code name for the CIA’s cable-tapping operation on the outskirts of Moscow, an operation that had harnessed the best in American technical and human intelligence. The tap had been placed on an underground communications line between Moscow and Krasnaya Pakhra, the location of a nuclear weapons research institute southwest of the Soviet capital. For years, the United States had listened to communications between the scientists working at the complex and defense officials back in Moscow by intercepting signals beamed through the air by microwave; but by the late 1970s, the Soviets had wised up and buried land lines underground. When American listening posts went silent, U.S. spy satellites began to search for clues of a new land-based communications system. It took them a while, but they finally detected telltale signs of construction alongside the main road between the complex and Moscow. Satellite photos soon revealed a series of manholes along the route, sites where maintenance workers could access the underground cable lines for repairs. Working with the National Security Agency, the supersecret eavesdropping and code-breaking arm of the U.S. government, the CIA hatched a plan to tap the lines and began training case officers at the Farm for the physically demanding operation.
In 1979, Jim Olson had been the first CIA case officer to go down into a manhole, and he planted the first listening device. It worked; the CIA and NSA had developed a unique “collar” that could eavesdrop on the cable without requiring a physical tap into the line. Soon, CIA officers were making regular runs out to the rural road where the tap was located to retrieve the tapes, which were constantly recording everything going over the line. It was a reprise of the CIA’s famous Berlin Tunnel of the 1950s and in many ways a landlocked version of the U.S. Navy’s equally secret operations to tap the Soviet Navy’s offshore communications cables.
It ran like clockwork for five years, but in the spring of 1985, when one of Stombaugh’s colleagues in Moscow Station had gone to retrieve its tapes, a secret alarm warned him that the device had been tampered with, and the officer aborted. After a lengthy debate between Moscow and Langley, the decision was made to send in another case officer, one who was at the end of his tour, thus making the risk of his walking into an ambush slightly more acceptable. When the officer returned successfully with the recording device, the celebration was short-lived. The tapes were blank. It was unclear whether there had been a malfunction or the KGB had tampered with them, so TAW remained on a list of unsolved “anomalies.”
Scratch TAW, Redmond thought. First TAW, and then there was the problem with Bokhan two weeks ago.
Sergei Bokhan, a colonel in the GRU—Soviet military intelligence—code-named GTBLIZZARD, had been spying for the CIA for ten years. In 1978, during his first tour in Greece, Bokhan told the CIA that a young American had walked into the Soviet embassy in Athens offering to sell the secret manual for the KH-11 spy satellite. His information led to the arrest of former CIA employee William Kampiles, who sold the manual for just $3,000. In 1984, during a second tour in Athens following a stint back home in Moscow, Bokhan revealed that a Greek agent with access to defense contractors had given the GRU technical data for the U.S. Army’s advanced Stinger antiaircraft missile. The loss of the Stinger was especially troubling for the Pentagon, since the Stinger was considered the most advanced shoulder-launched antiaircraft weapon in the world. As the GRU’s deputy Rezident in Athens, Bokhan was moving up in the Soviet espionage bureaucracy and promised to become an increasingly valuable mole.
Then on May 21, Bokhan received a call from GRU headquarters, instructing him to return to Moscow within a few days instead of waiting for his August home leave. His senses sharpened. He was told he had to return home because his eighteen-year-old son, Alex, was “having problems” at Kiev Military Academy. But it didn’t tally. Bokhan had spoken by phone to his brother-in-law in Kiev just a few days earlier and knew there was no problem with his son at that time. Were his bosses finally on to him? Bokhan became convinced that something was wrong when the GRU Rezident in Athens began nagging him about the matter, insisting that he return home by the end of the week. He tried to stall for time and called for an emergency meeting with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser.
Bokhan hurriedly laid out for Reiser what had happened, and both Athens chief David Forden, who happened to be back in Washington at the time, and Burton Gerber agreed that the sudden interest in Bokhan’s swift return was ominous. Gerber sent word to Athens to tell Bokhan not to go home. The CIA quickly set in motion Bokhan’s emergency exfiltration plan, and a few days later he was in a CIA safe house in the Virginia countryside.
TAW, BLIZZARD—and now scratch VANQUISH. One, two, three. Coincidence? Not fucking likely, Redmond thought.
Redmond was chief of the branch of the Soviet/East European Division responsible for all clandestine operations inside the Soviet Union. At forty-four he was an irascible, irreverent, Boston Irish Harvard man who some said owned just two shirts, both faded plaids with the sleeves permanently rolled above his elbows. On what his subordinates considered his good days, he wore a bow tie.
Redmond had served overseas in Zagreb, Kuala Lumpur, Athens, and Cyprus, but he and his wife, Kathy, had decided in 1984 not to venture overseas again until their two children were grown. Tethered to a headquarters job, Redmond, like Rem Krassilnikov, had found his niche.
His philosophy of U.S. intelligence was that given half a chance, Americans wouldn’t get into the spy business at all. And if forced into it, they wouldn’t be particularly good at it. He didn’t consider this a negative quality of the American psyche; it was just a condition to be factored into the way he did his job. Even though he was now on offense—ru
nning operations against the Soviets—Redmond had a natural inclination to the defense, counterintelligence. He believed that sooner or later the CIA would be penetrated by the KGB. Not a small-time penetration like Kampiles. No, America had not yet found its Kim Philby.
Maybe James Jesus Angleton hadn’t been as crazy as people thought. He had been convinced there was a mole inside the CIA. He had just been wrong about who, what, when, and where.
4
Moscow, June 13, 1985
Early on the morning of the Stombaugh ambush, Krassilnikov had visited Adolf Tolkachev at Lefortovo Prison. He sat patiently with the tired and defeated man in a second-floor interrogation room of the converted seventeenth-century czarist fortress, going over for a final time the procedures the scientist had used to arrange meetings with the Americans.
Tolkachev had been in total isolation since his arrest, and under Krassilnikov’s relentless interrogation, he had confessed—haltingly at first, then almost eagerly. Inevitably, he told everything as he formed a strange bond with the aging spy hunter. Krassilnikov gradually began to understand the narcotic rush, the exquisite excitement, that Tolkachev had found in his new calling. He didn’t spend time fretting over the harm Tolkachev had done to the Soviet Union. That could be left to those doing the damage assessment. Nor did he allow himself to loathe the traitor. Tolkachev was a counterintelligence challenge, a testimony to the professionalism of the men of the Second Chief Directorate who had tracked him. All that was left now was to tie it all together, and Adolf was being helpful on that score.
Adolf Tolkachev had lived with his secret for six years. He had never shared it with anyone, not even his wife or son. The operational discipline imposed on him by his CIA handlers had been sobering, but Tolkachev had always been fatalistic about the risks he was running. He had asked the CIA for a suicide pill in case of arrest, and after three refusals—the CIA’s self-imposed requirement—he had been given a cyanide capsule concealed, like the one given Ogorodnik, in a fountain pen.
A thin, stooped man who stood just five feet five inches tall, Tolkachev was still in his fifties, but he looked ten years older. Born in 1927 in Kazakhstan, he grew up in Moscow, where he and his wife, Natalia, both worked at the same research institute while raising their son, Oleg. They shared a life of relative comfort as part of the Soviet nomenklatura and made their home in #1 Ploshchad Vosstaniya, one of the city’s “Seven Sisters,” a Stalinist wedding-cake apartment building reserved for the pampered Soviet elite on Moscow’s Garden Ring.
Yet even as he rose through the system, Tolkachev brooded in silence. He harbored a deep hatred for the Soviet system, fueled in part by the ruthlessness with which the state had dealt with his wife’s family. Natalia’s mother had been executed during Stalin’s reign of terror in 1938, and her father had been imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for years and died shortly after his release in 1955. Eventually, some relatives had emigrated from Russia to Israel, but Tolkachev never told his CIA handlers whether he or his wife was Jewish.
All Tolkachev had in life was his wife and son. By the mid-1970s, he had become obsessed with somehow reaching beyond himself and dealing the system a heavy blow. He envied the dissidents who were beginning to challenge the Soviet system. Perhaps, he mused, if he had been a writer, he could have published samizdat, the underground dissident literature that had emerged in Moscow in the 1970s. But he was a scientist at a secret military design facility; with his security clearances, he could never attend a meeting of dissidents. The KGB would immediately discover him and he would be fired from his job—and perhaps arrested. He didn’t dare tell anyone he knew about his attitudes toward the government, for fear that he would be denounced. For years, he admired the dissidents from afar but took no steps to join their cause.
Finally, he settled upon a simple solution. He would become a silent dissident. He would become a spy for the United States. But how could an unassuming, middle-aged scientist with no intelligence background get in touch with the CIA in the heart of Moscow? Tolkachev’s zeal for his new task overcame his natural caution, and he decided that the simple and direct approach was best.
He was just turning fifty when he took the plunge in January 1977. At a gas station reserved for foreign diplomats near the U.S. embassy, he walked up to a car with diplomatic license plates and asked the driver if he was an American. When the man said yes, Tolkachev dropped a note through the car window and walked away.
By coincidence, the American happened to be Robert Fulton, the CIA’s Moscow station chief, who hurried back to the embassy to examine the note. Tolkachev had written vaguely that he had information that would be of interest and wanted to talk to someone about providing it to the United States. He didn’t identify himself in the letter and gave no indication of what that information might be.
It was the kind of “volunteer” approach that happened periodically in Moscow, perhaps half a dozen times a year, and that usually turned out to be either a KGB provocation or the product of a Russian’s overheated imagination. Once, for instance, the CIA had received a letter from a man living in Kaluga, Russia, who said he was in “electronics” and wanted to help. A CIA officer went to extraordinary lengths to break free of surveillance so as to call him from a pay phone; it turned out he was in home electronics, and the joke became that the CIA had found its own toaster repairman. In the endless stream of volunteers there was always, it seemed, someone with information on how the KGB was controlling the minds of Russians through dental implants, using the electric power grid to transmit their orders. So Moscow Station was skeptical when Tolkachev first made contact, and Fulton did not respond to his note.
But Tolkachev refused to accept this silent rejection. He watched for Fulton’s car and left a second note. The CIA again chose not to respond, and Tolkachev tried yet again with a third note. Through his insistent notes, the CIA began to realize that he was a serious volunteer. The frustrated scientist wrote in one message that he could understand why the CIA was not responding, that they might fear he was a KGB provocateur. But he added that he was not willing to say more about who he was or what he knew for fear the information would fall into Soviet hands.
By the time Fulton left Moscow for home, Tolkachev had dropped three notes, none of which had been answered. When Gardner “Gus” Hathaway took over as Moscow chief in mid-1977, Tolkachev was continuing to leave notes and was still being ignored by the CIA.
Stansfield Turner had imposed his Moscow stand-down, preventing Hathaway from responding, but the station chief soon began to plead with Washington to let him contact the anonymous volunteer. Jack Downing, now back in Washington from Moscow and serving as Turner’s special assistant, also lobbied his boss to lift the ban on Moscow operations.
Meanwhile, Tolkachev was growing bolder. He gave a note to Hathaway that included a portion of his telephone number. He said that if the Americans came to a certain bus stop at a certain time, they would see him holding an object that had the last two digits of his phone number on it. The CIA sent an officer out, and sure enough, he got the complete telephone number. By now, Turner had relented. He decided to let Hathaway contact the mysterious volunteer. But when an officer, briefly free of surveillance, called the number from a pay phone, Tolkachev’s wife answered, and the CIA officer hung up.
The two sides continued to miss each other for months. Unaware that the CIA had tried to phone him, Tolkachev left another note for Hathaway, and when that failed to prompt a response, he finally approached the Italian majordomo of Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. As the man stepped out of a car with American diplomatic license plates and walked into a Moscow market, Tolkachev sidled up to him. He asked if he could get a message to an American diplomat. When the man said yes, Tolkachev handed him another note.
Tolkachev had by then made half a dozen approaches, and the CIA was increasingly convinced that not only was he a genuine volunteer, but he was gambling with his life in his reckless bids to reach out to them. It
was time for them to seize control and create a secure means of communications with their eager volunteer. Still, Hathaway had to move gingerly; any foul-up with this operation might convince Turner to shut things down in Moscow for good.
Ducking out during an intermission in a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, Hathaway’s deputy, John Guilsher, managed to stay free of surveillance long enough to call Tolkachev from a pay phone. This time he found him home. He immediately told him that the United States had received his messages and that it was time for him to stop his approaches. For his own safety, he would have to be patient from now on.
The next time Guilsher called, he was at a pay phone near Tolkachev’s apartment. Come out to the pay phone, Guilsher told Tolkachev, and pick up the dirty glove you’ll find in the booth. Inside the glove, Tolkachev found a message from the CIA along with secret writing materials and questions for him to answer to prove that he had the kind of access to Soviet technology he had claimed in his notes.
When Tolkachev mailed his answers to an accommodation address in Germany, the agency’s experts immediately realized that he was the real thing: a scientist with incredible access to Soviet secrets. They concluded he was not a double agent; there was no way the Soviet government would dangle a man who actually handled such vital military information. After the CIA had pored over his answers, Guilsher was told to recontact Tolkachev in January 1979.
This time, Guilsher called from a pay phone near Moscow’s Gorky Park and asked Tolkachev to come out immediately to meet him. The two men walked around the park and began laying out a plan for Tolkachev’s espionage career.
The Main Enemy Page 4