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

by David E. Hoffman

  On June 6, Guilsher met Tolkachev face-to-face for the third time. When Guilsher spotted him, Tolkachev was wearing a dark tan raincoat with a yellow-and-brown-plaid shirt. After they exchanged paroles—a phrase known only to each of them, such as “Boris sends regards”—Tolkachev gave Guilsher twenty-nine pages of handwritten notes and ten exposed film cassettes from the Molly miniature camera.

  When they talked, Guilsher asked about Tolkachev’s health, recalling that he mentioned in his April letter that he suffered from leg pains, mostly in his shins, diagnosed as thrombophlebitis. Tolkachev replied there had been a misunderstanding; it was his wife who had the ailment. She had been treated at the local clinic with compresses and some ointment, but Tolkachev wanted to know if the CIA could come up with something more effective. It was just another small glimpse of the world of shadows and shortages in which Tolkachev lived every day. Guilsher gave Tolkachev some advice he’d been sent from headquarters about treatments.15

  Guilsher then gave Tolkachev the ops note he had written, a list of questions or “requirements” from U.S. experts, a schedule for future meetings, and a Pentax ME single-lens-reflex 35 mm camera and lens for copying documents, with a clamp to fasten it steady to a chair or table. Guilsher went out of his way to explain the details about money: the CIA would maintain a dollar savings account, with interest, and give Tolkachev a “six-figure” salary, as he had requested. Guilsher pointed out that it was better to be paid in dollars than in rubles; the dollars were safe, compared with rubles, which could be lost in periodic currency confiscations and devaluations in the Soviet Union. Tolkachev’s reaction was noncommittal. Guilsher observed that Tolkachev always kept his cool. On this day, he was absolutely unreadable.

  Tolkachev mentioned to Guilsher, almost as an afterthought, that he didn’t know what to do with all the money anyway.

  Guilsher handed him another 5,000 rubles. They were together only fifteen minutes.16

  On June 18, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II strategic arms treaty with the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, at the conclusion of a three-day summit in Vienna. Carter had come into office brimming with idealism about nuclear arms control, but by 1979 all he could manage was a treaty that barely slowed the arms race. During the negotiations for SALT II, the Soviets repeatedly expressed alarm about a new weapon being developed by the United States, the strategic cruise missile, a pilotless projectile carrying a miniature nuclear warhead that could fly high over hostile territory, then swoop down to fifty feet above ground level and steer toward its target with a sophisticated, terrain-sensitive guidance system. What worried the Soviet Union was the low altitude. It did not have effective radars at low altitude, a gap in air defenses it had simply been unable to close. This vulnerability was one of the most important subjects in Tolkachev’s reporting. In a White House meeting during the President Ford years, Undersecretary of Defense William Clements had once informed the president, “Our cruise missile projects drive them up the wall because their defense will not protect them from our cruise missiles, and they know it. Cruise missiles cause them plenty of pain and agony.”17 By the third year of Carter’s presidency, the American cruise missile was fast becoming a reality. On July 17, a month after Carter signed the treaty with Brezhnev, a Tomahawk cruise missile successfully flew its first free-flight test by General Dynamics, which was locked in a competition with Boeing to build the new weapons system. The cruise missile didn’t fly as fast as an intercontinental ballistic missile, but it was sneaky and nearly unstoppable. Secret tests by the U.S. military, completed in September 1978, showed that current Soviet air defenses were ineffective against it.

  Still, there was one nagging uncertainty: What were the Soviets going to do about it?18

  Tolkachev’s notes and film from the June 6 meeting with Guilsher were sent back to headquarters. The notes were translated, and by June 25 the details were on the desk of George T. Kalaris, chief of the Soviet division. Kalaris was a tall man with a commanding presence who had spent most of his career in the clandestine service as an operations officer, working in Greece, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, and Brazil. He had won special admiration for acquiring a warhead and operational manual for a Soviet SA-2 anti-aircraft missile in Indochina. He knew the perils—and stress—of espionage operations. Later, he had been brought in to clean up the counterintelligence staff after Angleton’s reign of paranoia. Then, in 1976, Kalaris was put in charge of the Soviet division. Direct in manner and conversation, he inspired confidence in those who worked with him.19

  The moment he got the notes from Tolkachev, Kalaris realized they were something extraordinary. Despite all the Soviet complaints about the U.S. cruise missile, Tolkachev reported that Moscow’s defense planners and weapons designers had “just started to study the problem” of how to respond.

  Just started? This would give the United States breathing room and confidence that the weapons system could be effective for years to come. Immediately, Kalaris wrote a note to Turner, the CIA director, and the two deputy directors, describing Guilsher’s meeting in Moscow, the handoff of notes, and the ten exposed film cassettes. “cksphere’s information continues to receive the highest evaluation,” he wrote. In addition to the intelligence on the cruise missile, Tolkachev’s notes contained information on a new surface-to-air missile system and confirmed CIA reports that the Soviets were building a new identification system for military units. “All of this will impact upcoming national estimates,” Kalaris said, referring to the CIA’s most important finished intelligence reports for policy makers in government.20

  On the document routing sheet, Kalaris asked that his note be kept out of the regular filing system; the fewer people to see it, the better. He asked that it be hand carried to Turner and the two deputy directors. One of them scribbled a single word on the routing sheet.

  “Fabulous.”

  7

  Spy Camera

  Tolkachev had access to extremely sensitive and secret documents, but it wasn’t going to be worth much to the CIA if he could not copy them. At first, he memorized what he saw and wrote the texts by hand into a notebook, but that was not practical for larger quantities over the dozen years he envisioned spying. His ability to copy documents without being detected was the linchpin to everything he and the CIA wanted to accomplish.

  The first camera the CIA had given him for copying materials was the miniature Molly, but it was not the CIA’s best equipment. Headquarters informed the Moscow station on July 4, 1979, that the ten cassettes passed by Tolkachev to Guilsher were “basically unreadable,” except for a handful of legible pages. The reason was poor focus and movement while Tolkachev was holding the tiny camera. This was a frustrating setback, not only for the loss of eight hundred frames of documents, but for the larger doubts it raised about the Tolkachev operation.

  Tolkachev could not simply step into a back room at his institute and make photocopies. The Soviet authorities had long feared copiers. At its most basic, the machine helped spread information, and strict control of information was central to the Communist Party’s grip on power. In most offices, photocopy machines were kept under lock and key.

  “A copying machine is located in a special room and operated by four or five employees,” Tolkachev wrote to the CIA of the situation at his workplace. “Entry to the copying room is not allowed to persons not working there.” Secret documents would have to be submitted for copying by the First Department, while any worker could send in unclassified documents. But he added, “Before an unclassified document can be submitted to the copying department, an order must be filled out. This form must include a certification by the First Department concerning the classification of the document, i.e., a certification that the document is not classified. In these documents there can be no word or phrase revealing the nature of the enterprise or institute. For example, the First Department would not allow the following sentence: ‘The radar station has several
work modes.’ The sentence would have to be changed to the following form: ‘Item 4003 has several work modes.’ ”1

  From Tolkachev’s note, it was obvious that photocopies were not an option. The CIA would have to rely on cameras and film.

  When spying for the CIA and the British in the early 1960s, Penkovsky had relied on the commercially available Minox Model III camera, which was also widely used by the KGB and other intelligence services. The camera was 3.2 inches long, 1.1 inches wide, and only 0.6 inch deep, small enough to fit in the palm of a man’s hand with a four-element lens that could focus closely. The Minox was excellent for photographing documents, letters, pages of books, and envelopes but could not be easily used without others’ noticing. The shutter was noisy; it required two hands and proper lighting—not the best for covert photography.2

  Penkovsky’s arrest was due in part to a lack of sophisticated technology for espionage. After-action reports underscored the absence of effective gear for the operation, particularly in agent communications. “There simply were no suitable devices on Agency shelves for this type of operation,” recalled Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton in an authoritative history of CIA spy craft. “For instance, as late as 1962 the CIA had yet to develop a small, reliable document copy camera for agents.”3 But technology exploded in the years that followed. By 1970, the CIA’s experts had begun working on an extremely small and quiet camera. The requirements were almost unimaginable: it had to be able to work effectively inside a KGB office without being detected. That became an urgent need when the CIA recruited Ogorodnik in Colombia in 1973. Under tight security, the agency hired a precision optical contractor to build a tiny camera, designated T-100, just one-sixth the size of the Minox, with a small, cylindrical shape that could be concealed in such everyday items as pens, cigarette lighters, or key fobs. The camera was “a jewel of watchmaking mechanical precision and optical miniaturization,” wrote Wallace and Melton. The lens was made up of eight minuscule ground-glass elements, exactingly stacked one on top of the other to achieve clarity in photographing a standard letter-sized document. The film, lens, and shutter were housed in a single aluminum casing. As each picture was taken, the film automatically advanced to the next frame, up to a hundred. The assembly was closer to watchmaking than any commercial manufacturing process; each one was fabricated individually, under a large magnifying glass. The supply was very limited. When the British intelligence service asked if they could borrow the blueprints to open a second supply line, the CIA agreed—but the camera was so complex the British could not replicate it.

  The camera’s small size forced designers to use an extremely thin film. The answer was found in retired stocks of an Eastman Kodak film once made for spy satellites, sliced and wound into the miniature enclosure. After some technical problems with loading the film, the CIA developed a second-generation camera, the T-50, which had fifty exposures. With this camera, the agent would not have to fuss with changing film; he would just use the device and return it. For Ogorodnik, a luxury fountain pen was selected as the concealment, with the camera tucked inside. To photograph a document, Ogorodnik was trained to position his elbows on the table, hands together, and aim the pen down toward the document. Eleven inches from the page was the perfect distance. The camera was called the Tropel, after the Rochester, New York, company that made it for the CIA, and the camera worked splendidly in the mid-1970s for Ogorodnik.4

  When Tolkachev began spying in early 1979, the CIA was reluctant to give him the elegant little Tropel. Tolkachev was a new agent, untrained and untested. Instead, they gave him the Molly. It was about the size of a matchbox, based on the Minox, built by a contractor to the CIA’s specifications, and named after the contractor’s daughter. The one given to Tolkachev bore the serial number 018 and came with a separate light meter. The film was wound into special cassettes, each about eighty exposures, packaged in boxes.5

  By April, Tolkachev reported to the CIA he was having trouble with the Molly. He realized it was dated. “Having familiarized myself with the camera, I was somewhat disappointed, possibly this is tied in with my having more optimistic notions concerning the development of technology in this field,” he wrote to the CIA.

  In response, headquarters decided to give Tolkachev the 35 mm camera, the Pentax, and the clamp, which Guilsher passed to Tolkachev on June 6. The Pentax wasn’t obviously spy equipment; it was in use all over the world and probably would not look entirely out of place if found in the apartment of a Soviet engineer. With the Pentax and the clamp, there was a good chance that Tolkachev’s photography would not suffer from blurs or shake. As tradecraft, it dated back to at least World War II, when a spy for Germany had used a Leica 35 mm camera, held in place with a makeshift clamp, to photograph documents.6

  The CIA pondered whether to also give Tolkachev the sophisticated Tropel cameras. In the end, headquarters decided to offer him two Tropels but with the caution that they were only for “testing” at home; he should not risk taking them to the office. In Moscow, Guilsher juggled these demands and uncertainties. He approved the plan to give Tolkachev the Tropel cameras but insisted that headquarters send to Moscow written instructions for using them, in Russian. The camera came in different sorts of concealments—a pen, a key fob, and a lipstick. It was important to make sure Tolkachev agreed in advance on the concealment and that it not look out of place with other things in his coat pocket. Tolkachev had told them he normally carried a pen and keys.

  Everything had to be just right. The Tropel camera could be a death warrant if discovered by the KGB. It had no purpose other than espionage.

  Two of the miniature Tropel cameras were in the package Guilsher handed to Tolkachev when they met again on October 15, 1979. One camera was red and the other black so that Tolkachev and the CIA could keep track. Each was preloaded with 120 frames of film and concealed in a pen, for “testing” at home.

  When they met, Guilsher sensed that Tolkachev was irritated about something else. More than four months had passed since they had seen each other. Tolkachev complained that his request for a suicide pill, made in the spring, had been ignored for half a year. Tolkachev pressed Guilsher, saying he wanted it soon. Tolkachev described to Guilsher an incident in which the driver of a Moscow trolley bus had slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident, causing passengers to fall and seriously injuring some of them. He reminded Guilsher that he regularly took the bus and the streetcar with secret documents in his coat. What if that happened to him? Tolkachev promised he would carry the suicide pill with him only when he had secret documents on his person. The rest of the time, he would hide it at home. He promised it would be only a last resort. He did not want to face the ordeal of interrogation and trial. If caught, he wanted to take his own life.7

  Tolkachev said he didn’t want to waste precious moments talking about finances, but he had written out a reply to the CIA in an ops note. Guilsher put the note in his pocket.

  The next morning, back in the Moscow station, Guilsher opened Tolkachev’s note. After a few pages, he reached item No. 7, “Concerning Finances,” and saw trouble. “The last financial proposals passed to me in June did not enthuse me,” Tolkachev wrote. “These proposals sharply deviate from my desires, communicated in one of the notes.

  “When I wrote about the remuneration of Belenko, like about the sum with six digits, I was inaccurate, since I had in mind not a figure with six digits, but a number with six zeros.

  “According to the information available to me, his sum was equal to six million dollars.”

  Guilsher had read and translated all of Tolkachev’s handwritten notes since his first days in the Moscow station. He had met with Tolkachev four times and felt he understood him. Yet there were moments when he was floored.

  Tolkachev wanted millions of dollars?

  He read on.

  “Sometimes it appears to me that, in the matter of finances, a definite tactic is employed against me,” T
olkachev complained. “I understand the gradual approach in the question of finances, which you are carrying out with me. However, in order that your tactics in this matter not create stoppages or delays in the passage of information, and would not bring about irreversible negative consequences, I would like you to take into consideration the following factors when examining my financial position.” Tolkachev wrote with a strong hand and underlined the words about negative consequences.

  “My basic goal in working with you,” Tolkachev went on, “consists of passing you the maximum amount of information in the shortest time.

  “I do not limit myself to the passage of information on documents that have direct bearing on my work, but I actively seek out new important documents and try to receive access to them, in order to make photocopies.

  “As you are aware, I started working with you voluntarily. In order to establish contact, from the moment the first note was passed until the first meeting, exactly two years was required. During these two years, I trained myself to accept the idea of the possible consequences of my actions. Today, just as before, I understood that the end may come at any moment, but it does not frighten me and I will work to the end. However, I will not always work only on a voluntary basis.”

  Again, Guilsher saw the heavy underline.