The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  It soon became clear that Tolkachev could not be handled through the traditional and impersonal methods the CIA preferred to use in Moscow. He was prepared to provide several dozen rolls of film at a time, far too much material to be left at a dead drop in an alleyway. He would have to be met in person, regularly, by a case officer in Moscow. To arrange the meetings, the CIA would communicate with Tolkachev through sophisticated short-range burst transmission devices, including a new system called Discus, which could send messages of up to 2,300 characters as far as a mile away.

  After that first meeting, Tolkachev and Guilsher met about once every three months. At first, Tolkachev provided long, handwritten notes on the advanced “look-down, shoot-down” radar systems for Soviet fighter aircraft that he was helping to design. Before long he was given a 35 mm camera and film, and he began handing over bags filled with rolls of photographs of classified documents from his institute. Tolkachev amazed his handlers with his prolific production; at one meeting alone, he turned over 174 rolls of film, with 36 exposures apiece. Tolkachev didn’t have a private office at his design bureau, but he was willing to take huge risks, photographing documents at his desk with co-workers nearby. He learned to pile stacks of books around him so that he could photograph documents without being observed. Inside the office, he used miniature cameras provided by the CIA; at first, he was given a “molly,” a camera the size of a matchbox. Later, the CIA replaced it with a T-100, a slender cylinder about 11⁄2 inches long, followed by the more advanced T-50. But he preferred the more reliable 35 mm camera and would often take documents home at lunchtime or overnight and photograph them in his apartment before returning them to the design bureau’s library.

  His production astonished the CIA and made him a secret superstar inside the American national security apparatus. At Langley, insiders liked to say that Tolkachev “paid the rent” for the agency, justifying the CIA’s budget virtually by himself. His intelligence allowed the U.S. Air Force to see what the Soviets were planning for their next generation of fighter aircraft, and that meant that new American planes could be engineered to defeat them before the Soviet fighters ever flew.

  Among the many secrets Tolkachev handed over during his six years as a spy were the designs for the avionics, radar, missiles, and other weapons systems for the MiG-23; the missile and radar capabilities of the MiG-25; and the existence of the new Su-27 fighter and the MiG-29 and its advanced radar. Tolkachev’s information also frequently showed the Pentagon how its research to counter Soviet systems had been heading down the wrong track, and several American defense programs were revised or scrapped as a result. In December 1979, the Air Force completely reversed direction on a $70 million electronics package for the F-15 fighter aircraft. In a 1979 memo to CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Air Force Chief of Staff General Lew Allen Jr. stated simply that Tolkachev’s intelligence “was of incalculable value.” In May 1979, the CIA hosted a three-day seminar for a small group of officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Air Force, and other agencies to review Tolkachev’s work. The consensus was that Tolkachev had saved the U.S. military “billions of dollars and up to five years of R&D time.”

  Tolkachev never told his wife or son about his espionage, to protect them if he was ever arrested. This sometimes led to communications glitches. His apartment was only five hundred meters or so down the Garden Ring Road from the U.S. embassy, and his signal that he was ready to meet with the agency was to open a fortochka, a small ventilating window common in Soviet apartments. A CIA officer would check his ninth-floor window on his way to work, or his wife could pass by on a shopping run. But at least once, after Tolkachev left the window open to signal for a meeting, his wife closed it before anyone from the CIA had a chance to check it; Tolkachev was left waiting at the meeting site alone.

  Tolkachev did not ask for money in his initial messages to the CIA, and after he began to meet with Guilsher he made it clear that he was motivated by a deep hatred of the Soviet system. Still, he told Guilsher he wanted the CIA to pay him so he could be certain that the agency took him seriously and that the Americans valued his information. The CIA obliged, handing over hundreds of thousands of rubles bought on the black market in Germany and setting aside far more in a reserve account he could use if he ever defected.

  Tolkachev was smart enough not to spend his cash lavishly. He bought a car for the first time in his life, but it was a simple Zhiguli, a Soviet-built Fiat. He also found a small dacha for his family. Still, he began to feel uncomfortable with the huge sums of money he was receiving from the CIA, money he couldn’t spend without drawing suspicion. Eventually he asked his handler to give some of his money to the families of jailed Soviet dissidents. The CIA never did meet that demand, but the request convinced the agency that he was driven by deeper motives than cash.

  He did, however, make requests of a more personal nature. He asked for medicine and books for himself, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which was banned in the Soviet Union; the memoirs of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; novels of Russian masters like Turgenev and Pushkin; and, incongruously, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (The KGB would later have a field day when they discovered this; they would play on Tolkachev’s first name, Adolf, and smear him by alleging that he was a closet fascist.)

  He also wanted to give a few small things to his family. He asked for supplies that were hard to come by in Moscow for his son’s studies in architecture, and Western rock and roll for the boy’s music collection, from Led Zeppelin to Uriah Heep and the Beatles. The CIA worried that he would have a hard time explaining how he’d come by new American records, so the agency’s technicians bought the records, rerecorded the music on cassettes, and packaged them so they looked like cheap knockoffs from Eastern Europe.

  In the fall of 1980, David Rolph, a young Russian-speaking case officer, took over from Guilsher and became Tolkachev’s lifeline to the CIA for the next two years. Rolph was part of a new generation of highly educated case officers who would make their mark in the coming decade. Before joining the agency, he had been a country lawyer in southern Indiana, married with small children and increasingly fearful that his dreams of seeing the world were passing him by. An Army brat, Rolph had grown up on a series of military bases, but mostly at Fort Knox, Kentucky. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, where he studied Russian history, he enlisted in the Army one step ahead of the draft in the midst of the Vietnam War. The Army sent him to Russian-language training in Monterey, California, and before long, Rolph found himself in training for Army intelligence. A quick promotion to officer followed, and by 1971 he was serving as an Army intelligence officer in the Berlin Brigade. The end of the Vietnam War meant an early discharge, and Rolph returned to school, this time to Indiana University, for a master’s degree in Russian studies. He was hoping to become a college professor. But the academic job market in the mid-1970s was abysmal, so he switched to IU’s law school in search of a more marketable degree and paid his family’s bills by working as a flight instructor at Bloomington’s airport. After law school, he worked one year as an attorney at a small practice in Spencer, Indiana, but the work was simply too boring to keep his interest, and he sent off an application to the CIA.

  When he took over the Tolkachev case, Rolph became the front man for what had become a veritable industry within the American intelligence establishment, one that was built upon Tolkachev and his secret documents. In the days leading up to a meeting with Tolkachev, Rolph could feel the anticipation and tension build across the cable traffic from headquarters. He knew how much was riding on each meeting; yet he also knew that he couldn’t let the pressure from Langley push him into taking unacceptable risks. He had little difficulty reminding himself that Tolkachev’s life mattered more than the secrets he might pass at the next meeting. Rolph stayed with his personal rule—if he ever felt he wasn’t absolutely free of surveillance, he would abort the meeting.

  But Rolph never had to cancel a
meeting, thanks to Moscow Station’s ingenious use of disguises and identity transfer techniques, which allowed him to break free of surveillance on a regular basis.

  Before some of these meetings, Rolph and his wife would make an obvious show of visiting the apartment of the station’s deputy technical officer, a man the KGB knew did not conduct clandestine operations. In the apartment, Rolph would switch into a disguise that made him look like the tech officer, and then he would leave the compound with the station’s chief technical officer—the boss of the man he was imitating. After driving around Moscow in a VW van for an hour to make certain they weren’t being followed, Rolph would switch into a second disguise so that he could pass for an average Russian worker. He would walk an elaborate surveillance detection route through the streets of Moscow for the next two hours before finally heading to the meeting site. The whole process was reversed on the way back. All the while, his wife and the deputy tech officer would have to sit perfectly still in the apartment, so that the KGB’s eavesdroppers wouldn’t detect that the tech officer was still home.

  By early 1981, Tolkachev had bought his little Zhiguli, and he and Rolph began to hold their meetings inside the car, parked on the street. Rolph worried endlessly about the security of these car meetings. In winter, the Zhiguli’s windows would steam up while they talked; Rolph worried that a local militiaman would pound on the door and wonder why two men—rather than a man and a woman locked in a passionate embrace—were inside.

  Rolph was soon struck by Tolkachev’s fatalistic attitude toward his work as an American spy. He seemed resigned to the fact that he would eventually be arrested and appeared driven to steal as many secrets as possible before the inevitable end. Rolph was handling the case when Tolkachev began demanding a suicide pill. When his request was initially rebuffed, Tolkachev started handing notes to Rolph to deliver straight to the CIA Director and the President. He wanted them to know that it was his personal wish to receive such a pill and was not an idea forced on him by Rolph or anyone else. Finally, after nine months of begging, Rolph gave him one cyanide capsule. Once he bit down on the capsule, Rolph instructed Tolkachev, death would come in three to five seconds.

  Tolkachev was always eager to find new ways to increase the number of documents he could copy for the CIA. Early on in his espionage career, he found that he could check classified materials out of the library at his design bureau and take them home at lunch to photograph before handing them back in. But then the library began tightening up its security procedures and eventually required that an employee leave a security badge—a propusk, in Russian—before checking out materials. All employees had to show their ID cards to enter or leave the building, so the new regulation meant that Tolkachev could no longer take documents home to photograph.

  Tolkachev told Rolph that if the CIA could forge a propusk for him, he could leave his original ID card with the library when checking out classified materials and flash his fake one to go in and out of the facility. Tolkachev gave photographs of his propusk to the CIA, which finally fabricated a copy after months of trying to match its exact colors and design.

  By late 1982, Tolkachev had produced so much and was calling for meetings with the CIA so frequently that the agency decided to tell him to slow down. He was taking too many risks.

  There was no sign of trouble at the regularly scheduled meeting in April 1983, but soon after that, Tolkachev panicked and broke off contact for several months. He’d heard that an investigation was under way at his institute. The word in the office was that some sensitive information had apparently leaked from the design bureau, and security officials were launching a probe. For a time, Tolkachev became so convinced that the KGB was closing in on him that he would go to work with his cyanide pill tucked carefully in his mouth. He even went into a meeting with his supervisor with the “L-pill” between his teeth, in case his boss was about to denounce him as a spy. A little pressure on the capsule, a few deep breaths, and he would escape. But after ten minutes of innocuous talk about a technical matter, the meeting ended, and Tolkachev returned to his cubicle, cyanide pill still in his mouth, hands clammy, adrenaline coursing through his system.

  Tolkachev took everything linking him with the CIA to his dacha, itself bought with CIA money, and burned it in his wood stove—communications plans, intelligence collection requirements, everything, including a bag of cash. He watched over 200,000 rubles go up in smoke.

  But in the end, Tolkachev’s craving for excitement won out. After skipping three meetings with the CIA (his case officers had to abort two attempts to meet him during the same period), Tolkachev reestablished contact in November 1983. He told the CIA about the security probe at his institute, but by then he was confident that the investigation was over.

  Once again Tolkachev began photographing secret documents. This time, his production was reduced—he had already copied most of the key documents related to his field of expertise. Now he was mostly providing updated information to supplement material he had given the Americans in previous years. The CIA held only two meetings with Tolkachev in 1984; the case had peaked.

  Tolkachev’s last meeting with the CIA came in January 1985, when two anomalies occurred that would later raise questions at Langley. He opened a different fortochka in his apartment from the one he had used in the past to signal for meetings. And when he handed over his film at the meeting, it turned out to be out of focus. The CIA knew that the KGB sometimes had agents it had brought under control hand over out-of-focus photography of top-secret documents, in order to convince the Americans that their agent was still safe and working without actually revealing any sensitive information. During their brief January meeting, Tolkachev warned his new case officer that he was worried about the film. He said he’d photographed the documents in a darkened bathroom at the design bureau but wasn’t sure the pictures would come out.

  Still, when Tolkachev failed to show up for a scheduled meeting in April, there was no great sense of alarm. After all, it had happened before. The CIA went to a backup plan, calling for an emergency, out-of-sequence meeting, using one of the prearranged signaling options. But by then Tolkachev was under arrest, and he had revealed his communications plans to the KGB. Paul Stombaugh’s emergency contact signal to Tolkachev—his car, with American diplomatic tags, parked in front of a fruit and vegetable store on Tchaikovsky Street, a Moscow city street map tossed casually on the dashboard—was spotted by Krassilnikov’s stakeout.

  Krassilnikov let the CIA request pass without response. Having Tolkachev miss an emergency meeting might sharpen his adversary’s senses, but it wouldn’t be enough to convince the Americans that there had been a serious security breach. The CIA’s agents in Moscow frequently missed meetings for any one of a dozen reasons. He would toy with the Americans a little longer.

  On June 5, the CIA aborted an attempt to meet with Tolkachev after a case officer detected KGB surveillance. Finally, Krassilnikov decided to end the game. At exactly 12:10 P.M. on June 13, a time set in the CIA communications plan months earlier, he opened the small fortochka at the top of the large set of windows facing Tchaikovsky Street in Tolkachev’s apartment.

  Krassilnikov closed the little ventilation window exactly one-half hour later, as the communications plan called for. A CIA officer “read” the window signal in a routine drive-by, and by late afternoon of the next day, two CIA officers—Paul Stombaugh, whose KGB code name was Narziss, and a second officer given the KGB code name Lark—were both on the move. The Americans had taken the bait. Even the Moscow weather was cooperating; the skies had abruptly cleared after three days of thunderstorms.

  Shortly after 5:00 P.M., Paul and Betsy Stombaugh were “called out” by static surveillance: The KGB was alerted that the couple had left home and were moving around the city. For the next three hours, they appeared to be on a routine shopping expedition. The Stombaughs made three stops at shops in various parts of Moscow, all frequented by diplomats. Their car was lost by surveillance on
two occasions, but each time it was picked up by another static team in a different part of town and reported back to Krassilnikov’s command post. Krassilnikov had ordered the surveillance teams following both Stombaugh and the other officer to stay back as far as possible. He didn’t need close-in trailing surveillance, since the ultimate destination on this pleasant June evening was under his complete control. The CIA officers could make their runs as elaborate and as long as they liked, but eventually one of them would come to him and spring his trap.

  By 8:00 P.M. Sharavatov began to feel it was Stombaugh making the run to meet Tolkachev. After their third stop, the Stombaughs were lost again for seven minutes, until Betsy Stombaugh was picked up shortly after 8:00 P.M. pulling into the parking lot of the Ukraine Hotel on the banks of the Moscow River. She was alone.

  5

  Moscow, 1901 Hours, June 18, 1985

  Colonel Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, until four weeks earlier the acting Rezident of the KGB station in London, was at this moment trying to will himself into invisibility to everyone save the British Secret Intelligence Service in Moscow. Sweat beaded on his face as he stood stiffly in his gray raincoat, the shiny toes of his rubber boots evenly aligned just inches from the curb of Kutuzovsky Prospekt in busy central Moscow. He stared blankly out at the traffic whirring by him, wondering whether the perspiration was driven by the deep pit-of-the-stomach fear that had been his constant companion for the past four weeks or the Cuban rum he drank late into almost every night. Probably both, he decided.

  He knew that his attempt to look like just another Muscovite struggling to get home at the end of a rainy day was futile. His peaked leather cap, an acquisition from his posting in Denmark, was out of place with his drab Russian raingear; and the newspaper-stuffed Safeway supermarket shopping bag he gripped in his left hand was, he was certain, a gigantic red flag fluttering in the faces of pedestrians hurrying toward the Kievsky metro station and the limousines filled with Party seniors whirring past him in the center lane of the wide boulevard. He was terrified that his appearance somehow screamed out, “He’s here, the runaway British agent, catch him before he gets away!”