The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

by David E. Hoffman

  The secret writing and onetime pad had been executed perfectly. The CIA realized that they were dealing with an organized, precise person who followed instructions, a genuine volunteer with great potential.

  Tolkachev also sent them a tantalizing hint: he had a ninety-one-page notebook crammed full of information he wanted to deliver.

  With the arrival of the secret-writing letters, the CIA had successfully carried out a clandestine exchange with the agent, but it was cumbersome, and they still lacked a long-term plan for communications. Hathaway was eager to press ahead. He wanted to end the stand-down once and for all. He proposed to headquarters that they carry out a personal meeting, a method that would allow the CIA to examine more deeply what the agent could do and what he wanted.

  In a cable to headquarters, Hathaway and Guilsher proposed repeating the August routine with the construction mitten: calling Tolkachev, but this time meeting him by the telephone booth. They would ask him to bring the notebook. Guilsher would conduct a walking meeting with Tolkachev and stroll toward the Moscow River. A big advantage was that the area was dark and fairly deserted at night.24 On November 4, headquarters came around to Hathaway’s suggestion of a personal meeting, “the primary purpose of which is to find out just who cksphere is, what precisely he wants, and to negotiate the terms, means and general parameters of our continued cooperation.” Turner approved the plan on November 21. This effectively marked the end of the stand-down, more than a year after it began.

  The hope was that a meeting would lead to a long-term channel for keeping in touch with Tolkachev, but Hathaway still faced difficulties. Guilsher was being subjected to increased surveillance, and he might not be available for the personal meeting. The Moscow station also wanted to provide more detailed questions for Tolkachev, and headquarters agreed. Much would depend on how Tolkachev answered the questions, which probed his living and job situations, family, privacy at home and work, vacation plans, hobbies, security, health, whether he owned a camera and a radio, access to classified documents, description of his office desk, what equipment he worked on, names of supervisors, and what journals he had access to.

  Finally, they were almost ready. A last step was to inform the U.S. ambassador, Malcolm Toon. The ambassador didn’t like the idea. If the meeting blew up, it could be embarrassing.

  But Hathaway persuaded him it was necessary.

  5

  “A Dissident at Heart”

  On New Year’s Day 1979, Moscow was locked in the grip of a frigid cold wave. Windows frosted over, cars would not start, and the streets were nearly deserted. John Guilsher noticed that KGB surveillance had almost completely disappeared, perhaps because of the holiday and the numbing cold. He decided this would be the day. From their apartment, John and Kissa drove their daughter Anya to a birthday party at the U.S. embassy compound. When it was over, about 5:30 p.m., with the city already shrouded in darkness, they headed home. Not far from the apartment, they stopped the car. John silently got out from behind the wheel and disappeared down a narrow lane. As he left the car, he was dressed in a plain overcoat and fur hat, looking like a Russian pensioner, unremarkable in the night. Kissa drove home.

  Guilsher boarded a bus and then got off at a Metro stop close to Tolkachev’s apartment, the same location where they had placed the construction mitten in August. He examined the broad, open area and saw no one watching him. His radio earpiece, set to monitor any transmissions from the KGB, was quiet. Guilsher went to a phone booth and placed a call to Tolkachev. Guilsher introduced himself as “Nikolai” and asked Tolkachev to come “at once” and bring “the materials.” Fifteen minutes later, Tolkachev appeared.

  He was neatly dressed, somewhat shorter than Guilsher, with a long oval face, slightly jutting jaw, a rugged appearance, and a few gold or silver teeth. Calm and disciplined, Tolkachev did not look around nervously. He kept to the subject they were discussing and answered questions clearly.

  When Guilsher asked if he brought the notebook, Tolkachev slipped it out of his coat. Normally, Guilsher carried a briefcase, but he left it at home, thinking that on a holiday it would look out of place. Guilsher tucked the notebook under his belt and felt the sting of icy air on his midriff.

  Then he asked Tolkachev the question that had nagged at them all: What was his motive for taking such a big risk? Tolkachev replied, hesitantly, that it was a complex question, one that would require a lot of time to discuss.

  Guilsher prodded him again. Why?

  Tolkachev responded only that he was “a dissident at heart.”

  Then Tolkachev had a question for Guilsher. He wanted to know how much the United States had paid Belenko, the MiG-25 pilot who defected from Japan in 1976. Guilsher had anticipated the question. He said he didn’t know how much Belenko had been paid but offered Tolkachev 1,000 rubles a month for his cooperation. Tolkachev asked Guilsher for 10,000 rubles for his work so far. Guilsher said it would be no problem and gave Tolkachev 1,000 rubles. It was a ridiculously small sum, perhaps three times the monthly salary of a mid-career Soviet academic, while the intelligence Tolkachev had already provided was worth tens of millions of dollars to the United States. Guilsher gave Tolkachev some additional questions to answer next time they met.1

  Guilsher cautioned Tolkachev that money had often been the undoing of agents. He recalled the 1977 arrests of two agents in Moscow, which had been written about in the newspapers, saying it was because of money. This was stretching the truth—they were arrested for other reasons—but Guilsher thought it might give Tolkachev second thoughts. Besides, Guilsher said, there was not much to buy in Moscow, which was plagued by shortages. Tolkachev acknowledged the risk, saying he would be careful and sensible. He told Guilsher his family did not really need more money. He could explain any cash as part of an inheritance from his mother, who had died recently. Guilsher got the distinct impression that Tolkachev wanted money as a sign of respect, to show that his efforts were valued.

  The streets were empty as they walked, two men in overcoats, speaking quietly, enveloped in Russia’s winter darkness. Their words were terse and to the point. Guilsher, who had never before been a case officer on the street, wanted to get it right. He asked Tolkachev if he had a private office where he could use a camera to photograph documents? No, Tolkachev said, but if he had a camera that was relatively quiet, he could probably linger at the office at the end of the workday, perhaps for twenty or thirty minutes until the doors were locked, and photograph documents. Guilsher was impressed with the answer; it showed Tolkachev knew his limits and how not to raise suspicions. Tolkachev said a camera would relieve him from writing up so much by hand. Guilsher promised to deliver a camera soon.

  Tolkachev said he had absolutely no privacy in his apartment. The family telephone was in the kitchen, and his wife or son often answered. There were only two other rooms. He confessed he had spent hours waiting by the phone for “Nikolai” to call. When he needed to work in private on the ninety-one-page notebook, he had retreated to the Lenin Library, the largest public library in Moscow, hunched over it for hours, alone.

  For forty minutes, they walked and talked in the biting cold. Guilsher sensed it was time to part. They shook hands, and Tolkachev disappeared into the night.

  Guilsher took the bus toward home, the notebook still tucked into his belt. He uttered not a word about the meeting to Kissa and went to bed with the notebook under his mattress. The next day, he carried it to the station. The first thing he did was send a cable to headquarters that the meeting had come off without surveillance and that he had given Tolkachev 1,000 rubles and additional questions. Guilsher wrote, “There were no untoward incidents. cksphere handed over 91 pages of what I think will be invaluable intelligence.”2

  Then, in a longer cable, Guilsher described the meeting. Guilsher said he was “highly impressed by the coolness and professional behavior” of Tolkachev. “On a day when the average Soviet was somewh
at inebriated, he appeared to be absolutely sober,” Guilsher wrote. Tolkachev had allowed Guilsher to steer the direction of their conversation and appeared to accept him “as an expert in whose hands he placed his future safety.”

  As case officer, Guilsher’s entire focus was on the operational details, such as communications, meetings, and planning. The “positive intelligence,” the information about Soviet military radars and other matters contained in Tolkachev’s ninety-one-page handwritten notebook, was rushed directly to headquarters, where it was translated and carefully analyzed.

  Immediately, headquarters had reservations about the money, unsettled by the prospect of Guilsher delivering wads of cash. What Guilsher had told Tolkachev was certainly true: a trail of money had often led agents to be careless and cause their own downfalls. Guilsher reassured headquarters on January 22 that Tolkachev was “keenly aware” of the dangers and agreed to warn him again at their next meeting. During the walk, Guilsher said, he raised with Tolkachev the possibility of a hard-currency escrow account in his name in the West. This would be safer, but Tolkachev brushed it off, saying he would never have any use for it. Guilsher urged headquarters not to renege on the 10,000 rubles he had promised. They still had to earn Tolkachev’s trust. “At this point, we feel it is essential to live up to our arrangement and pass him the requested sums,” he wrote to headquarters. By delivering the money promptly, he added, “we hope to instill in him a complete trust in us and, once he is confident we will live up to our part of the bargain, we can begin to probe delicately to try to resolve this ticklish topic.” Guilsher suggested they wait six months before bringing it up again.

  The first meeting touched off a flurry of activity. Now, at last, the Moscow station was back in the espionage business. Every action of human intelligence collection—putting down a dead drop, such as the construction mitten with secret writing hidden inside, or making a call from a phone, or writing an operations note to an agent, or preparing sites for meetings and signals—demanded intense preparation by the station and frequent cables back and forth to headquarters. Running a spy was undertaken with the concentration and attention to detail of a moon shot: neither the station nor headquarters wanted to leave anything to chance; not even the smallest nut or bolt could be out of place. Photographs and maps were prepared of each site; surveillance detection runs plotted; scenarios scripted and rehearsed; and the question was asked again and again: What could go wrong?

  Guilsher had to speak up for the agent in the back-and-forth with headquarters; become a friend and confessor to the agent; serve as the agent’s adviser and protector; provide equipment, training, money, and feedback; become the trusted face of the CIA and the United States to someone who had never set foot in America—and all of this with a man he hardly knew. Every case officer worked with the realization that no agent was ever completely knowable. They behaved in unpredictable ways, often beyond the control of their handlers.

  Guilsher’s next move was to write a personal letter for a package they would deliver to Tolkachev in February. He drafted the letter in a way that he hoped would be unambiguous, praising Tolkachev as “reliable and calm,” expressing confidence that “you will always act sensibly,” that “it will be possible to count on you to observe the instructions” in the communications plan, and that “you will calmly fulfill the role that you have chosen.”

  Then Guilsher shifted tone to that of coach, saying that Tolkachev must strive to “not attract attention in any way.” He explained, “One has to look and behave like the average person on the street; in the office, not to show too much interest in the work of others, not to request materials from the first department which are not connected with your work and not to work late too often, i.e., stay in the office by yourself.” The First Department was the repository in Soviet research institutes for top secret documents and also a security office for keeping watch on workers and controlling clearances for access to the secret materials. Further, Guilsher instructed, “In your private life it is important to establish a pattern of life that will cover our contacts and will not arouse suspicion at home. Mainly, it is necessary to act calmly and not to rush.”

  Guilsher appealed to Tolkachev to “share with me, at any time, any thoughts which you cannot discuss with your wife and friends.” He urged the spy to speak up if there was anything that worried him. He closed the letter, “I shake your hand, Nikolai.”3

  On February 17, 1979, Guilsher went on a surveillance detection run and, free from the KGB, laid down a package for Tolkachev to pick up. Once again, the package was hidden in the dirty construction mitten. This time it contained one miniature camera, known as a Molly, a light meter, film, camera instructions, an operations note, the personal letter from Guilsher, an evaluation note from CIA headquarters, further questions or “requirements” from the CIA, a communications plan, and 5,000 rubles, or half what Tolkachev had requested for his work so far.

  The evaluation was upbeat but not specific, saying the secret-writing letters had been prepared with “fine technique” and the information “very well received.” The ninety-one-page January notebook showed “painstaking effort and dedication,” and the CIA was “very impressed,” but the evaluation stopped short of details, except for one.

  Tolkachev was given a very specific request: to obtain any information he could about a radar known as the RP-23. This would be “of utmost value.”

  In March, a cable from the Moscow station to headquarters noted that Tolkachev was now “fully operational.” But the CIA’s agent and his case officer were still finding their way.

  Guilsher had instructed Tolkachev on the procedure for confirming an impromptu meeting. Under the plan, the CIA provided Tolkachev with a set of quick meeting sites, locations that were close to his apartment building. Each was given a Russian code name, such as ninochka. The plan was that Guilsher would call Tolkachev’s home phone and ask for “Ninochka,” signaling a desire to meet at that site. If he could come on short notice, Tolkachev would say the caller must have a wrong number and hang up—then go out the door.

  However, when Guilsher made the first phone call one day in February, asking for “Ninochka,” Tolkachev made an error. “Is this Nikolai calling?” he said.

  That wasn’t the right answer. Guilsher hung up.4

  Guilsher tried again on the evening of April 4, asked for “Valery,” and this time it worked. Tolkachev was out the door quickly. They met for fifteen minutes at site VALERY and traded packages. Tolkachev gave Guilsher five cassettes of exposed eighty-frame film from the Molly miniature camera, fifty-six pages of handwritten materials, including a long letter to the CIA, and four sketches.5

  Seven days later, headquarters sent Hathaway and Guilsher a hint that Tolkachev’s material was impressive. “You will be interested to know,” the cable said, “that the material from the January package” had been formally distributed “in a document over 100 pages in length” and “initial reaction from the Air Force is highly enthusiastic, and the material is clearly having a significant impact.” In fact, the January notebook had contained a rich harvest of secrets. Tolkachev had included a detailed description of the sensitive work in which he was involved, as well as exact formulas, diagrams, drawings, and specifications of weapons and electronic systems. He copied by hand top secret documents authorizing the construction of new types of aircraft not yet known in the West, such as the Sukhoi Su-27 advanced fighter. He had carefully drawn various diagrams on oversized graph paper. Every document was neatly recorded, every word legible. The notebook contained vital details about aircraft design, speed, radio frequencies, weapons, avionics, radars—a look at blueprints still on the drawing boards, and a glimpse of planes that would not be flying for a decade.6

  Guilsher’s two meetings with Tolkachev had been productive, but the men had not engaged in the kind of free-flowing conversation that would reveal Tolkachev’s motives or thinking in any depth. Guilsher was hungr
y for more. In the long letter Tolkachev handed to him on April 4, there were tantalizing hints that Tolkachev was a strong and unwavering personality, a person who took the long view. In the letter, Tolkachev laid out a plan to spy for the United States for twelve years in seven stages. He described what materials he would provide and when. It was an extraordinary blueprint and a declaration of his seriousness. Tolkachev said his goal was to damage the Soviet Union to the maximum extent possible. “I have selected a course which does not permit me to move backwards and I have no intention of veering from this course,” he wrote. “Since I have tasked myself with passing the maximum amount of information, I do not intend to stop halfway.”7

  Another clue to his personality, Guilsher saw, was Tolkachev’s stubborn and determined effort to contact an American, which he now revealed in some detail to the CIA in his long letter. “The idea to pass a note by a car or in a car did not come at once,” he wrote. “At first I tried to find out if it was possible to establish communications at exhibits in which the USA participated. This turned out to be difficult since the exhibits are relatively rare and there are always many people present.” Then he went on solitary walks around central Moscow. He had spotted a car with the license plate D-04-526, the “04” indicating it was driven by Americans. This led him to decide to make contact by sliding a note through an open car window or talking to the driver. “At first,” Tolkachev recalled, “I naively thought that it is only necessary to select a convenient moment, to come up to the car, to request a conversation, and that I will be welcomed with open arms.” He added, “I started to search for a place where one could approach a car. Thus started my purposeful walks along the streets of Moscow and along Devyatinsky Lane that lasted many days and many hours.” This was the small street along the edge of the embassy compound where he had approached Hathaway.