Rolph was near the statue when he saw the man he was looking for, carrying a magazine, approaching from the Metro.
Rolph spoke first. “Victor Ivanovich?”
“Yes.”
“Good evening. I am Misha.” Rolph extended his hand.
Sheymov shook it, but he told himself it was important to establish that this man was really an American intelligence officer. He might be walking into a trap.
They started walking. Both were in their early thirties. Rolph saw that Sheymov’s face was smooth, clean, boyish. He wore a military-style cap. Sheymov thought Rolph spoke Russian with an accent, although it didn’t necessarily seem to be an American one. Sheymov noticed that Rolph didn’t wear gloves—a Russian would.
Physically, Rolph was coiled, thinking that any second the klieg lights would come on, the KGB officers would spring from the bushes, and he and Sheymov would be ambushed.
Sheymov had taken a roundabout subway route to avoid surveillance, but he was also worried and tense. He knew more than Rolph did about how the KGB worked, that they used “floating” surveillance teams, which roamed the city and could appear randomly. He noted a nearby phone booth was empty; at least that was a good sign.
Both men had been trained to carry out operations with a basic principle: once it begins, don’t think about it. Both knew that their business was to spend hours and hours planning, but in execution an operation would be brief and had to be flawless. The metaphor in Rolph’s mind was of an actor stepping on the stage: once the curtain came up, you just did your best to perform. Sheymov believed the worst thing an intelligence professional could do would be to give in to fear. That meant losing control.
“You might be KGB,” Sheymov said to Rolph.
“I can’t be KGB, I speak Russian with an accent,” Rolph protested.
“Okay, but they can speak Russian with an accent, too,” Sheymov said.
The two men walked through the park, away from the Metro and the statue. Darkness enveloped them. They kept quizzing each other, both looking for any sign of trouble.
Sheymov repeated that he wanted to be exfiltrated with his family. Rolph responded that it was a tall order and might take twelve to eighteen months to prepare. He told Sheymov that he would have to provide some information first. Rolph thought they might meet again in a month or two, but Sheymov said, why wait? He would be ready in a week. Sheymov insisted that they meet in person. He did not want to communicate with the Americans by dead drop. He told Rolph that KGB counterintelligence had made a long list of people arrested for working with spies—caught in a dead drop, caught using a radio. No one had been caught in a personal meeting. Sheymov wanted to see his CIA case officer face-to-face. Rolph agreed.
They parted, and Rolph took a Metro a few stops toward the center of Moscow. His wife picked him up in the car, and they headed home. The next morning, everyone crowded around Gerber’s conference table to hear what had happened.
Rolph thought he might have a month to prepare for the next meeting, but now he had only a week. He surmised that the KGB had figured out his trick of going abroad and returning home early, so he could not repeat it. The Moscow station created an elaborate plan for the next meeting. Rolph would be the primary case officer, but if he came under KGB surveillance, there would be a second and a third officer nearby on the streets, having completed their own surveillance detection runs, ready to slip into his place, just in case. They did a month’s work in just a few days.
As it turned out, Rolph was clear. The meeting began without trouble. Rolph asked Sheymov some questions from headquarters about complex mathematics and cryptology, and Sheymov answered into Rolph’s small tape recorder. They again discussed exfiltration. Sheymov wanted $1 million upon his arrival in the United States, immediate citizenship, and lifetime health benefits for his family. Rolph didn’t make any promises. He asked Sheymov for mundane but essential details about his family: clothing sizes, medical histories, weights, and shoe sizes. And he needed recent photographs of everyone for the new identity documents they would get after exfiltration, on the other side.
At one of the first meetings, Rolph gave Sheymov the CIA’s miniature Tropel cameras. Rolph said to him, “Photograph the most highly classified papers you have. Don’t take chances with other people around. But you have to prove to us that you are who you say you are.” Sheymov agreed. He returned the cameras with exposed film and was given a fresh supply.
Sheymov suggested the CIA fake the drowning of his family in a river so the KGB would not suspect they had defected. Rolph responded that the CIA and Sheymov had more important things to do—to ensure the actual exfiltration was a success. In fact, Rolph had given plenty of thought to what would happen once Sheymov and his family vanished. Inside the Moscow station, Rolph discussed how to make Sheymov “disappear without a trace.” They would leave the apartment exactly as it was—a cup of tea unfinished on the table, the bed unmade, a newspaper open, their clothes still in the closets. They talked about whether the disappearance could be explained as a drowning, but Rolph and the other case officers didn’t dwell on it. That was not something they could plan; it would just have to play out. The KGB would probably be much more inclined to blame an accident or crime, and it might be quite a while before they realized Sheymov had defected.
Rolph and Sheymov were walking down one of the narrow lanes in Moscow when they saw them, at the same moment. The nightmare scenario: two men in a playground sandbox. They could be anybody, but both intelligence officers instantly thought surveillance.
The narrow streets left them few escape routes, and if it were really the KGB, they would be boxed in at both ends of the street. As they got closer, Sheymov sensed they were not KGB but perhaps militiamen—crude, jumpy, capable of demanding papers, but not as threatening. Sheymov went over and asked one for a match. Then, after returning to Rolph, as they passed the two men, Sheymov berated Rolph as if they were having a family argument. His outburst carried them well past the men. Sheymov noticed they were in identical warm coats and reindeer fur-lined hats. He and Rolph turned the corner onto the next street.
They looked at each other.
“Criminal surveillance,” Sheymov said. “The militia.”
“How did you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Boy, that was a close call,” said Rolph. “Do you still like personal meetings?”
“Sure, now where were we?”
The Tropel cameras Sheymov had used and returned to Rolph were carried by hand back to the United States. Meanwhile, the tape recording of Sheymov’s answers in Russian about cryptology was translated in the station by Guilsher. When the film was developed, with more than a hundred pages of information, and the answers translated, an urgent message arrived at the Moscow station: Sheymov was for real. The intelligence was sensitive—the Soviets would never have used it for a dangle—and extremely important. The Soviet Union was installing new encrypted communications equipment around the world. Sheymov could unlock those messages. Rolph had told Sheymov that exfiltration might take twelve to eighteen months, but now there was a fresh urgency. The National Security Agency wanted him brought to the United States—fast.
Sheymov had given the Americans a tantalizing taste of his material, but he possessed much more. He knew the clock was ticking: the longer he was in Moscow, the greater the chance he would be discovered. Also, the size of what he wanted to deliver to the United States was too large to be transmitted in any dead drop or other means in Moscow. To damage the Soviet Union and save himself, he had no choice but to defect.
The CIA and the National Security Agency also realized the information Sheymov possessed would be immensely valuable as long as the Soviet Union did not know it was missing. Once discovered, the Soviets might change the codes. So they had to get Sheymov out without the KGB’s knowing he had gone to the United States, at least for as long as possibl
e.
In the Moscow station, Rolph reached for the files marked “CKGO.” Not only did he get his first operation, but it was to be one of the most audacious ever attempted.
At their third meeting, Sheymov delivered photographs of his family that the CIA could use for preparing documents and the other information Rolph had asked for. The biggest hurdle for the exfiltration was Sheymov’s young daughter. Two adults could remain silent for the forty-five minutes or so it would take to smuggle them across the border in a van, but a four-year-old girl? How to keep her quiet? Rolph secured from the CIA five samples of sedatives suitable for a small child. He was worried; he thought for sure Sheymov would refuse to take them. Rolph had a daughter about the same age, and he would never have given her any pills from the KGB, but to his surprise Sheymov agreed. Sheymov gave the CIA carefully hand-drawn charts on his daughter’s breathing and pulse each time she took a tablet. They selected one sedative for the exfiltration.
The Moscow station had conducted five meetings with Sheymov over a period of about ten weeks. The pace was unprecedented.
Although he preferred personal meetings, Sheymov signaled at one point that he wanted to use a special kind of dead drop, known as a foot-timed drop, in which the package is left by the agent and picked up by the case officer in short order. Rolph saw the first signal, then waited for the second signal that the drop had been filled before he went out on an evening walk. He retrieved Sheymov’s package intact and took it to the station the next morning. Among other things, he found an ops note from Sheymov tucked into a small glass bottle with a stopper, about two inches high. Rolph thought that Sheymov was being extremely careful, putting the note in the bottle to keep it dry. But actually, Sheymov had another purpose in mind. The label on the bottle said it held fifty tablets of extract of valerian, an herb for soothing nerves. He intended it as a signal to Rolph that all was going well and not to worry. No one in the station grasped the implication.
The final days had arrived. Sheymov was supposed to check a lamppost in Moscow for a signal from the CIA that all was ready to go. He and Olga rode a streetcar to the location, careful to be looking casual and not staring at each passing lamppost. But when they reached the stop, they realized all the lampposts had been ripped down for a construction project.
“What do we do now?” Olga asked him.
“We go,” Sheymov said. “I think at this point it would be more dangerous for us to wait than to try.” He sounded more confident than he felt.
The plan was to take a train to a secluded, forested point between Leningrad and the border with Finland, from which the CIA would whisk them out, hidden in a vehicle. The date was May 17, 1980. The operation was extremely sensitive. The White House knew about it but had instructed Gerber not to inform the U.S. ambassador at the time, Thomas Watson Jr. If the plan fell apart, all the blame would be laid on the CIA. But everyone in the station knew about it. The case officers had all contributed to the elaborate plan.
Rolph wanted to wait around the station that Saturday for word of what happened, but Gerber said it made no sense. He did not want to alert the KGB to any unusual activity. Gerber told the communicator on duty that he was expecting a message about an operation. If the operation was a success, the communicator should put a piece of paper with a large handwritten numeral 1 on the inner door to the station, the one that looked like a bank vault with a combination on it. If a failure, he said, write a 0.
Late on Saturday afternoon, Gerber went to the embassy building, ostensibly to pick out a film to watch at home that night. He briefly opened the outer door of the station and looked at the inner door.
A big 1 was taped to the door. Sheymov was out! The flight of ckutopia was over. Moreover, Sheymov had left behind clues to throw off the KGB. For months, they thought he had been murdered along with his family, although they could not find proof.
Rolph’s operation was brief but highly successful. A few months later, when Rolph was back in the United States, he met Sheymov again at a temporary safe house in northern Virginia. They embraced. Sheymov said to Rolph, “The whole time we were meeting, I wasn’t really sure whether you were actually CIA. The one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB is when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said, do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines.”
Now Rolph was ready for his next assignment, Adolf Tolkachev.
11
Going Black
Late in the afternoon of October 14, 1980, David Rolph walked out of the Moscow station and went home. An hour later, he returned to the embassy gate with his wife, dressed as if going to a dinner party. A Soviet militiaman, standing guard in a small shack outside the embassy, saw them enter. Rolph and his wife vanished into the building, navigating the narrow corridors to one of the apartments.
The door was already ajar. Rolph pushed it open.
They whispered not a word. The apartment belonged to the deputy technical operations officer in the Moscow station, an espionage jack-of-all-trades who helped case officers with equipment and concealments, from sophisticated radio scanners to fake logs. The Moscow station had two, the chief and his deputy. They had been highly trained by the CIA, similar to the case officers, but with different skills; they usually did not run agents on the street.
Three days out of four, the chief tech officer had no surveillance, and when he did have it, he tried to build the familiar patterns of activity that case officers believed the KGB would grow accustomed to. He stuck to very unremarkable routines, visiting stores and garages, foraging for supplies, repeating the same trips day after day. Sure enough, the KGB’s interest waned. Yet the techs were an essential part of the station’s espionage operations.
The deputy tech motioned wordlessly to Rolph after he entered the apartment. The men were approximately the same height and physique. In total silence, Rolph began to transform himself to look like his host. The deputy tech had long, messy hair. Rolph put on a wig with long, messy hair. The deputy had a full beard. Rolph put on a full beard. The deputy tech helped Rolph adjust and secure the disguise, then fitted him with the SRR-100, a radio scanner, antenna, and earpiece to monitor KGB transmissions on the street. The earpiece was made by the Swiss hearing aid company Phonak, and it was the most delicate part, disguised with a CIA-developed color-matched silicon to replicate the inner ear’s contours and shadows.1
Rolph heard a voice boom from the doorway. It was the chief tech officer, who had just arrived and was deliberately speaking loudly, assuming they were being overheard by KGB listening devices. “Hey, are we going to go and check out that new machine shop?” the chief asked. The real deputy replied, aloud, “Great! Let’s go.”
But the real deputy did not leave the apartment. The man who left the apartment looking like him was David Rolph. The real deputy pulled up a chair and settled in for a long wait. Rolph’s wife, in her dinner dress, also sat down and would remain there for the next six hours. They could not utter a word, because the KGB might be listening, and an elaborate deception was under way. The identity transfer had begun. Rolph was off to meet Tolkachev for the first time, if he could get free from surveillance on the streets.2
The point of the identity transfer was to break through the embassy perimeter and return without being spotted. Rolph knew the KGB was not interested in the two technical officers and usually paid little attention when they drove out of the compound in search of food, flowers, or car parts in an old beige-and-green Volkswagen van. On this night, the van pulled out of the embassy at dusk. The chief tech was at the wheel, Rolph in the passenger seat. The van windows were dirty. The militiamen just shrugged. It looked like the two supply guys on the prowl again.
Once on the street, the van took a slow, irregular course. The chief tech knew the city well, because he had less surveillance and was out driving of
ten. Rolph scanned the street, looking for signs they were being followed. The chief tech also had a practiced eye for surveillance and kept a close watch on the rearview mirror. They searched for cars with the telltale triangle of dirt on the grille, left there by the KGB car wash. They looked for panel trucks idling for no reason. The KGB had many ways to confuse them, including a reclining seat to conceal one of the officers and a switch in unmarked cars that could turn off just one headlight so the same car would look different on a second sighting.
Rolph thought to himself that he had one advantage: he was the orchestra director. He was the only one who knew where he was going. Everything they might do was in reaction to him. Normal drivers would pay no attention to the VW van. At a stoplight, they would pull right up alongside or behind. Rolph was watching for something that a normal car wouldn’t do. If there was a stoplight, why did the third car behind them pull in behind a bus? That was an indicator, and Rolph was collecting them, sifting, processing what he saw.
In departing the embassy in disguise, he was playing a game entirely based on deception; his goal was not to be noticed as he slipped out. But over the next few hours, he would gradually unfold a new approach. He would become more open and teasing. He would try to flush out the KGB. Ultimately, his mission was to “get black,” to completely shake the surveillance. But getting black required a long, exhausting test of nerves, even before he would get his first chance to look Tolkachev in the eyes.
On a surveillance detection run, the case officer had to be as agile as a ballet dancer, as confounding as a magician, and as attentive as an air traffic flight controller. Rolph had drilled in the CIA training courses, and he knew from his early days in army intelligence how important it was to absorb the lessons of those drills, mastering a sense of time and distance, exploiting the optics of moving through the gap. Rolph also planned meticulously, avoiding the hot spots and hidden cameras on the Moscow streets. Once, he was in the middle of a four-hour-long surveillance detection run and thought he was black. All of a sudden official-looking Zhiguli and Volga cars were whipping around turns and speeding back and forth. Rolph cursed to himself, “I’ve just walked into a beehive.” He later discovered he had happened upon an obscure KGB training academy in the middle of a practice session. The Moscow station kept track of the known hot spots with red pushpins on the city map so they could avoid them.
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Page 17