Hathaway was eager to resume espionage operations, to get back in the spying business. He was following the Gerber rules, which meant check out a volunteer, don’t dismiss him out of hand.
The plan went all the way to Turner on January 3, 1978, stamped “SECRET” and “WARNING NOTICE—SENSITIVE INTELLIGENCE SOURCES AND METHODS INVOLVED.”
In a summary memo describing the plan, Turner was told that cksphere was “a middle-aged Soviet engineer who has made five approaches to Moscow Station since January, 1977.” The summary memo recalled that the Moscow station did not follow up on these approaches because the man “did nothing” in the first four attempts to establish who he was and out of concern that it was a KGB provocation. Also, there was a desire to avoid an incident while the Carter administration was just settling in. But the summary memo noted that cksphere had been more forthcoming in his last note, passed at the market on December 10, 1977.
Was the intelligence really that good? The summary memo, like the earlier headquarters evaluation, was not overly enthusiastic. The MiG-25 radar update “does not do serious harm to the Soviet government,” it said, although look-down, shoot-down radar is “of high priority intelligence interest.”
Under a section titled “Risks,” the memo advised caution. Turner was told,
We have no proof that cksphere is a provocation, but his approach to us has many of the earmarks of previous cases that we found to be under KGB control. Even if he was bona fide in the beginning, his several attempts to contact us could have brought him under discreet coverage by the KGB. At best, we view cksphere’s bona fides and potential as unproven—in contrast to existing sources in Moscow whom we have not been able to contact during the operational standdown.
Turner was given two choices: Option B was go ahead and meet the engineer on January 9. But the summary memo concluded, “We recommend Option A—do nothing.” The reason? It was too risky. If the operation went bad, the memo said, it could lead to a third expulsion, prolong the stand-down, or even lead to closure of the Moscow station. Rather than contact the engineer, Turner was advised, “Our primary obligation and objective should be to resume secure and productive contact with the proven sources in Moscow.”
Turner agreed—the decision was Option A.
“Do nothing.”22
4
“Finally I Have Reached You”
The engineer still did not give up. On February 16, 1978, more than a year after the first approach at the gas station, Hathaway drove out of the embassy compound onto a side street. He slowed at a dark intersection. Suddenly there was a tap-tap on the window. His wife, Karin, sitting beside him, strained to see and rolled down the car window. The engineer was standing outside, leaned close, and shoved an envelope through. “Give to the ambassador,” he said urgently in Russian. The envelope fell onto Karin’s lap. The engineer turned quickly and disappeared. Hathaway made a U-turn, drove straight back to the embassy, and took the envelope up to the station.
The envelope contained a new letter from the engineer. He wrote that he felt caught in a vicious circle: “I’m afraid for security reasons to put down on paper much about myself, and, without this information, for security reasons you are afraid to contact me, fearing a provocation.” He then scribbled out his home phone number, except for the last two digits. At a given hour in the coming weeks, he promised to stand on a street at a bus stop, holding a plywood board. Written on it would be the last two digits.
Not taking any chances, the Moscow station sent a case officer on foot to look for the numbers, and also sent Hathaway’s wife, Karin. She drove their car by the bus stop, spotted the man, and noted the two numbers.1
Hathaway again pushed headquarters for permission to respond. The stand-down was still in effect, but Hathaway wanted approval to carry out a simple operational act—to make a contact. As it happened, just as the engineer made his last overture to Hathaway, the Pentagon sent a memo to the CIA expressing great interest in any intelligence about Soviet aircraft electronics and weapons control systems.
That tipped the balance. Headquarters relented and gave the green light to the station for a contact with the engineer.
Hathaway decided they would call him from a public phone on the street, but he knew it was risky; if a CIA officer was spotted by the KGB using a public phone, it might be traced. All the pay phone booths were numbered, and KGB surveillance could easily ask for an immediate trace of the call. On February 26, a case officer from the Moscow station went on a long surveillance detection run to avoid the KGB and then called the engineer’s home phone number from a phone booth. The man’s wife answered, so the case officer hung up. Two days later, the case officer tried again, with the same outcome.2
On the evening of March 1, darkness had fallen when the engineer approached Hathaway and his wife as they were getting into their car on Bolshoi Devyatinsky Pereulok, a tree-lined lane bordering the embassy compound. Hathaway was unlocking the car door on the driver’s side when he saw the engineer coming, recognized him, and extended his left hand. The engineer quickly placed a packet of taped paper into his hand. In Russian, the engineer said, “Pozhaluista,” or “Here you go,” and Hathaway responded, “Spasibo,” or “Thank you.” Hathaway noticed a pedestrian about twenty yards behind the engineer but did not think the handoff was visible in the dark. The engineer did not break stride as he passed and then slipped away down another side street. Hathaway went back up to the station—telling the guard at the gate he had “forgotten something”—and opened the packet.
Inside, he found eleven handwritten pages, in Russian, on both sides of six large sheets of paper. As before, they were folded inside two other pieces of paper to form a three-by-four-inch package, sealed with white paper tape and light brown glue. There were a few words in English on the outside saying please pass to the responsible person at the American embassy.
The note was the breakthrough they had been waiting for.
The engineer revealed his identity. He wrote,
Since on 21 Feb 78, you did not call me either from 1100 to 1300, nor later, and since on that same evening auto D-04-661 … was parked by house number five on Bolshoi Devyatinsky Pereulok, I assumed (although this seems improbable), that the missing numbers of my phone, shown on the board by house number 32, were not observed from a passing car and could not be written down. To eliminate any doubt, I am submitting basic information about myself. I, Tolkachev, Adolf Georgievich, was born in 1927 in the city of Aktyubinsk (Kazakhskaya SSR). Since 1929, I have lived in Moscow. In 1948, I completed the optical-mechanical tekhnikum (radar department) and in 1954, the Kharkovskiy Politechnicheskiy Institute (radio-technical department). Since 1954, I have worked at the NIIR (p.o. box A-1427). At present I work in a combined laboratory in the position of leading designer. (In the laboratory there exists the following hierarchy of positions: lab assistant, engineer, senior engineer, leading engineer, leading designer, chief of the laboratory.) My work phone: 254-8580. Work day is from 0800 to 1700. Lunch from 1145 to 1230.
My family: wife (Kuzmina, Natalia Ivanovna), 12-year-old son (Tolkachev, Oleg).3
Just to be sure, Adolf Tolkachev wrote down his home phone number again, 255-4415. He gave his home address, 1 Ploshchad Vosstaniya, apartment No. 57, ninth floor, a distinctive high-rise tower near the embassy, where he had lived since 1955. The building had multiple entrances, so he added, “Entry in the middle of the building from the side of the square.”
Tolkachev also volunteered instructions for how to call him without being detected. If a man phoned, he should identify himself as Nikolai. If a woman, as Katya. Tolkachev said he had spent “hours and hours roaming the streets” in search of U.S. diplomatic cars and, even when he found one, often did not leave a note right away out of fear of being detected. He said he was now desperate for a positive response to his prolonged effort, and if he did not get one this time, he would give up.4
In the note, Tolkachev provided precious new intelligence, far superior to what could be gained by other means. He reproduced quotations from top secret documents and offered more details about look-down, shoot-down radar. The note included an extremely important piece of identifying information: the postbox number of the institute where Tolkachev worked, A-1427.
The CIA now confirmed that Tolkachev was a designer at one of the two research institutes for Soviet military radars, especially those deployed on fighter aircraft. He worked at the Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering, known by its Russian acronym, NIIR. It was about a twenty-minute walk from his apartment.
The time had come to give him a positive response. At last, the Moscow station was revving up again.
The case officer who had made the phone call from the pay phone was John Guilsher. A handsome man, forty-seven years old, with dark eyebrows and graying hair swept straight back, he was quiet and reserved. He loved the outdoors and once aspired to be a forest ranger, but Russia took him in a different direction.
Guilsher’s parents and grandparents had seen their families and fortunes destroyed by the upheavals of the last century in Russia—war, revolution, and exile. Guilsher’s parents, George and Nina, grew up in Petrograd, children of the nobility in the twilight years of the imperial court. They had known each other from childhood. George attended the Imperial Lycée and worked in the tsar’s Ministry of Finance. He later fought against the Bolsheviks after they seized power, serving in one of the White armies that were supplied by the Americans and the British. A brother also served with the Whites and was killed early in the conflict. George was the only member of the immediate family to survive the war. He fled with the defeated White soldiers to Constantinople, landed in New York City in 1923, and was reunited with Nina, who had suffered her own harrowing escape after five years of impoverished, desperate existence in revolutionary Petrograd. They were married in 1927 in New York, where George became a production manager for the equipment manufacturer Ingersoll Rand.
They had three children; John was their second son. He grew up on 122nd Street in New York City in the years before World War II, then the family moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island, after the war. They escaped the summer heat at an aunt’s house in Cornwall, Connecticut. Although they came from well-off families in Russia, they arrived penniless in America, and the early years were lean. When John and his brother were very young, their sister recalled, they were often seen wearing clean and crisp little boy sailor suits, suggesting a certain prosperity. In truth, they each had only one, and their mother washed and ironed them every night. Russian was spoken at home, and their father was often deep in conversation with friends about literature and politics in the Old World. He kept a diary in which he tracked all the historical events of Russia, including specific decrees, birth dates of famous writers and other historical people, and also the saints of the day. He collected Russian stamps and took his sons to museums. John Guilsher had never been to Russia, but Russia was all around him.5
In 1945, when John was fifteen years old, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. While supporting his mother with summer jobs, including one shoveling out coal furnaces, Guilsher went to the University of Connecticut on a scholarship and studied forestry. His brother had settled far away in Alaska, and John visited him there, enthralled by the big sky and open spaces. When the Korean War broke out, John joined the army but spent his tour on loan to the National Security Agency. In 1955, at the end of his military service, he joined the CIA and was sent to London, where he worked on the Berlin tunnel recordings.
Before his departure to London, he had met and fallen in love with a beautiful young woman, Catherine, known as Kissa, who was also a scion of Russian nobility. Her father had fled the Bolsheviks and settled in Belgrade, where Kissa was born. The family was uprooted again by the upheaval of World War II and fled to the United States. By her teenage years, Kissa had felt the wrath of both communists and Nazis and was eager for a better life. She met John one summer evening in Washington, where she was studying at George Washington University. They were engaged for two years while he served in London and she finished her degree. They married in London in 1957. John was already starting a career in the CIA, but on their honeymoon he wistfully broached the possibility of giving up intelligence and following his dreams to work in forestry in Alaska. Kissa protested, emphatically. Guilsher spent the rest of his career in the CIA.
John spoke Russian with a very slight accent that suggested he was from the Baltics, but his language skills were superb and proved to be extremely valuable in those early years of the Cold War. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he participated in two of the CIA’s most significant operations against the Soviet Union: the Berlin tunnel and Penkovsky.
When Hathaway was assigned to become chief of station in Moscow in 1977, he handpicked Guilsher to join him. They had never served together, but Hathaway knew of Guilsher’s language skills. One day, Kissa and their children were summering at the family home in Connecticut when John called with the news: they were bound for Moscow. She was delighted, despite the hardships. They were going back to the land of their forebears, not as children of the nobility, but to carry out espionage against the Soviet Union. They were unsentimental about it; the Russia of their ancestors had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks. John had been working against the Soviet target for twenty-two years from various posts outside the country. But this job would be different. Previously, he had been a language officer, unraveling the spoken and written word. Now, for the first time, he would be a case officer, running agents on the street, inside the Soviet Union. And Kissa would be helping him.6
They arrived in Moscow on July 16, 1977. An embassy officer was sent out to meet them at Sheremetyevo International Airport. After they cleared passport control and collected their dog from the veterinary station, the embassy officer confided some shocking news: Marti Peterson had been caught placing a dead drop, and she was leaving Moscow at that very moment from the same airport. John immediately grasped the consequences: Ogorodnik was compromised and would probably pay with his life.
A few weeks later came the Moscow embassy fire, then the second agent was caught, followed by Turner’s order of a stand-down. Guilsher found the mood grim in the Moscow station. The quarters were cramped, and there was construction all around to repair the fire damage.
Guilsher also was a target of close surveillance by the KGB—more so than most. His apartment was bugged. When John and Kissa wanted to talk about anything sensitive, they wrote notes to each other, but carefully, on wood or metal, so as not to leave an impression on the page underneath that could be read later by the KGB. John repeatedly insisted to Kissa that they live a “low key” and mundane life in Moscow, repeating their routines over and over again so the KGB wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary—drawing on the 1950s lessons of Haviland Smith. Kissa chafed at the restrictions; she was as outgoing and personable as John was reserved.
The KGB surveillance could be surprisingly unsophisticated. John and Kissa more than once went to a closet to reach for an overcoat, only to find it was missing, apparently taken by the surveillance people to implant a microphone. The coat would mysteriously reappear later. One summer evening, the family decided to meet some friends at a restaurant outside Moscow and discussed the trip over a phone line, knowing the KGB was probably listening in. As they drove, the Guilshers counted no fewer than three surveillance cars in front and behind. Then they got a little lost. One of the KGB surveillance cars pulled off to a side road unexpectedly.The Guilshers didn’t know where they were going, so they just followed. The KGB surveillance took them right to the restaurant.
At the same time, the KGB could also be quite sophisticated. In 1978, inspectors uncovered an antenna in the chimney of the embassy building. The purpose of the antenna was never discovered. Typewriters were examined that year, but the technician did not find any bugs. In fact, the Soviets h
ad begun in 1976 implanting hidden listening devices in IBM Selectric typewriters sent by the State Department to the Moscow embassy and Leningrad consulate for use by diplomats. The bugs, which contained an integrated circuit, would send a burst transmission with data from the keystrokes on the typewriter. Ultimately, sixteen typewriters were bugged and remained undetected for eight years, although none were located in the CIA’s Moscow station.7
On the street, Guilsher learned to spot surveillance. The large Soviet-made Volga sedan used by the KGB had a V-8 engine with a distinct growl compared with the four-cylinder engine in other cars. John also discovered the smaller surveillance cars, the Zhigulis, often displayed a telltale, small triangle of dirt on the grille, apparently where the brushes at the KGB car wash didn’t reach.
Back when he was preparing for the Moscow assignment at CIA headquarters, Guilsher had seen the first note handed to Fulton by the Russian man at the gas station. He thought it sounded sincere and not typical of provocateurs or dangles. Later, working in the Moscow station in late 1977 and early 1978, Guilsher translated the notes given to Hathaway by the engineer. Guilsher thought it was unlikely that any of the man’s notes had fallen into the hands of the KGB. The man was careful to deliver them only when Hathaway was obscured by trees or a high snowbank.
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Page 7