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

by David E. Hoffman

  Tolkachev told Rolph that the concealment for the L-pill—the pen—was just fine and no changes were necessary.

  Rolph noticed that Tolkachev’s greeting had been warmer than before. When they met in the park, they grasped each other’s arm, firmly. Tolkachev was talkative. All was well with his family and his work, he said. Rolph thought, he may be starting to trust me.

  Headquarters had instructed Rolph to avoid talking about exfiltration. They wanted to keep Tolkachev in the Soviet Union as long as possible. But Tolkachev would not let go of the idea. In a speculative moment, he came up with a wild, dreamy plan and tried it out on Rolph, who could not quite believe what he was hearing. “Now, if you can have a special airplane that will fly in and pick me up, you could land it in a field someplace in the woods, and we would come running out of the woods, and get in the plane and take us out,” Tolkachev said. It was totally unrealistic, Rolph thought. This was the Soviet Union, heavily armed. No American spy plane was going to successfully glide onto a field and carry Tolkachev away. But at least Tolkachev was talking to him and showing a human side.

  Rolph reached into the bag and gave Tolkachev his last parcel, which contained seven cassettes with the recorded music he had requested. The CIA had bought the cassettes in Eastern Europe, so they could not be traced. Tolkachev was thrilled. They had been talking for only fifteen minutes, but to Rolph it had a slow-motion feel, as if they had been chatting for an hour. They agreed to meet again in the autumn, after Tolkachev’s summer vacation. Tolkachev gave Rolph a seven-page ops note, handwritten.

  Once again, Tolkachev slipped away into the darkness, and Rolph returned to the embassy as the shaggy-haired tech in the Volkswagen van passenger seat.

  The next day, Rolph sent an account of the meeting to headquarters. He felt more than ever that he needed to emphasize how Tolkachev’s eyes lit up when he talked about the music and why that was important for the operation. He wrote that it was “truly interesting and revealing” how Tolkachev changed from his usual unemotional demeanor when this came up. “All of his interest in music is always explained in terms of his son’s affinity for it,” Rolph reported. “Although certainly not to the point of an obsession, his concern over seeing this request through to the end is near paramount. One gets the impression that as a father he has not always been able to provide everything he might like for his son and through this channel sees an opportunity to do something very special that he could never otherwise hope to obtain.” If the CIA could help Tolkachev with this, Rolph said, there was a chance “our stock will rise proportionately in his eyes.” Tolkachev was so enthusiastic that he asked the CIA for “the English texts of each of the songs contained on the cassettes.” Rolph acknowledged “this is a somewhat unusual request and certainly unorthodox” but said Tolkachev made it “in all seriousness” and there would be little additional risk to carrying it out.16

  In his written ops note, Tolkachev apologized that he could not obtain any more circuit boards or electronic parts from radar equipment: none were available, and even if they were, the risks would be too high.

  Rolph felt his duty was to explain Tolkachev to headquarters, to be an advocate, just as Guilsher had been. Faced with unceasing demands from headquarters for more production, Rolph wanted to impress upon them that Tolkachev was not a robot with a Pentax camera. He was a man who felt isolated and often needed to let off steam and feel rewarded. On April 2, 1981, Rolph sent an interpretive cable to headquarters. He wrote that Tolkachev displays “definite tones of frustration and discouragement when he discusses his personal requests.” He added that, in Tolkachev’s mind, if the CIA now trusts him with sophisticated technical gear like the miniature Tropel cameras and Discus, then “we should equally trust him and his sense of responsibility with the items which clearly mean something to him, that is his personal requests.” Those items included the music cassettes and a pair of Western stereo headphones, which Tolkachev had also requested in his ops note. Headphones and music cassettes would not stand out; they could be seen in some Moscow apartments. “We have increasingly come to the conclusion that in addition to the ‘get the system’ motivation, CKS is motivated by certain material impulses and particularly wants to reward his son with some benefits,” Rolph wrote.17

  His message, in short: don’t quibble over a pair of headphones for the billion dollar spy.

  In June 1981, headquarters, ever dreaming that technology would provide the extra edge over the KGB, sent an entirely new communications device to the Moscow station. It was, supposedly, even better than the Discus and would finally give the CIA an invisible and secure channel for messages to and from agents. The messaging system would connect directly from a ground transmitter to an American satellite. The Discus was strictly terrestrial: it could work for a few hundred meters, from man to man. But the new system, although bulky, could send a message straight from curbside to satellite and directly to the United States. It was based on U.S. Marisat satellites that had been launched in 1976 for ship-to-shore communications. Headquarters sent a cable to the Moscow station, suggesting they give the advanced new device to Tolkachev.

  The suggestion came just as new reports were arriving about a possible Soviet invasion of Poland. At headquarters, the CIA was seriously worried that a fresh crisis in Poland might lead to a dramatic break in U.S.-Soviet relations and perhaps an abrupt closure of the Moscow station. How would they maintain contact with Tolkachev? Headquarters insisted that the Moscow station think ahead and be prepared. Gerber believed a break in relations was far-fetched, but he could not ignore the insistent messages from Langley.

  Gerber’s doubts about the new device ran deep, just as they had with the Discus. The whole Tolkachev operation “has been geared for the long run,” he insisted in a cable to Hathaway. A meeting schedule was already in place for the next fifteen months, more than sufficient in the event of tensions or surveillance. Tolkachev was providing intelligence “of long range benefit to our govt and it’s not day to day intelligence.” Gerber added, firmly, “While we cannot predict there will not be an interruption in station ability to function here that will last longer than a year, there has been nothing we have seen which would indicate that an invasion of Poland would result in the breaking of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.”18

  Privately, Gerber was fuming. He had good personal contacts in Moscow and had been talking to a Polish diplomat. He felt confident the Soviets were not going to invade. But headquarters was pushing him to do something, so on June 24 the station prepared a contingency plan and a letter for Tolkachev, to be delivered only if events dictated. The plan was to give him the new communications device, just in case.

  Two days later, headquarters proposed a major change. Enthusiastic about the new communications device, they suggested that Tolkachev return the Discus and use the satellite system for all communications, in between personal meetings, “whether or not station stays or goes.”

  In fact, Tolkachev had not used the Discus once since he first received it. He had not even marked a signal that he wanted to use it.19 Gerber and Rolph quickly sent a protest back to headquarters. Again, they did not think the station was going to be kicked out of Moscow. They had “serious reservations” about using the new satellite device for all communications, starting with the fact that there had not yet been a single successful test of the machine from Moscow. Two attempts had failed. Besides, they pointed out, it wasn’t simple to get the Discus back. They couldn’t very well call the apartment and ask Tolkachev to just bring it to a meeting. Gerber and Rolph were annoyed. They said Tolkachev’s silence was probably because he was following to the letter their instructions to use it only for emergencies. Tolkachev “is an intelligent and resourceful individual who appreciates the risk involved in frequent contact and unnecessary ops activity,” they wrote. He just was being careful. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the promise of the new satellite message system vanished. It failed
more tests. The Moscow station told headquarters “we are becoming less optimistic” that the machine was right for Tolkachev. Not least of the reasons was that it didn’t seem to work.20

  When headquarters developed the fifty-five rolls of film Tolkachev had given Rolph in the park, six were blank. It might have been a glitch; Rolph didn’t want to bother Tolkachev about it but made a mental note to bring him a new Pentax camera body at the next meeting.21 On the remainder of the film, the CIA found sparkling new gems from inside Soviet vaults. Seven rolls of film documented a top secret surface-to-air missile code-named shtora, or “blind,” as in a window shade—designed to be “not detectable by target aircraft” because of its “advanced and complex jam-proofing and secure operating procedures.” Other rolls covered topics in computer logic for radar systems and provided the CIA with a set of logs of secret technical reports as they arrived at Tolkachev’s institute in 1978, 1979, and 1980, which would allow the Americans to accurately judge the state of Soviet military high technology.22

  The billion dollar spy had come through again.

  CIA headquarters dispatched to the Moscow station a pair of German-made stereo headphones, catalogs for stereo systems, and albums by Alice Cooper, Nazareth, and Uriah Heep.

  13

  Tormented by the Past

  His family and friends called him Adik. His eyes were the color of ash, under a broad forehead and thick brown hair, with a crook in the bridge of his nose from a boyhood hockey accident. He stood about five feet six inches tall. Tolkachev seemed a quiet fellow to those who knew him. He liked tinkering with electronics and enjoyed building things with his hands, holding a soldering iron or wood plane, fixing a radio, or hammering together a cold frame. Tolkachev was so reserved that he never told his son what he did at work or took the boy to his office.

  But inwardly, his mind was not at ease. He was haunted by a dark chapter of Soviet history, and he wanted revenge.1

  Tolkachev was fifty-four years old in 1981. He suffered from high blood pressure and tried to pay attention to his health, jogging in the spring, summer, and fall and skiing in the winter. He drank alcohol only rarely. He was usually up before dawn, especially in the long winter, according to letters he wrote to the CIA. Every other day during the week, he got out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and went for a run outdoors, if it wasn’t raining or biting cold. He usually took the main elevator down to the ground floor and pushed open the heavy door onto the tree-lined square, Ploshchad Vosstaniya, or Square of the Uprising, commemorating the revolts against the Russian tsar and later the Bolshevik Revolution. Day after day, he ran the same route: first across the square toward the broad boulevard known as the Garden Ring Road, then a right turn toward the U.S. embassy, past the guard shacks that stood in front of the embassy, then another right turn, down a small lane and the spot where, three years earlier, he had handed a letter to Hathaway, in the shadow of a small Russian Orthodox church.2 Tolkachev knew these streets well; he had walked and run them tirelessly in earlier years, searching for cars with license plates indicating they belonged to American diplomats, hoping to drop a note through an open window.

  In a letter to the CIA, Tolkachev described himself as a morning person. “You probably know,” he wrote, “that people are sometimes divided into two different types of personalities: ‘skylarks’ and ‘owls.’ The first have no trouble getting up in the morning but start getting sleepy as evening approaches. The latter are just the opposite. I belong to the ‘skylarks,’ my wife and son to the ‘owls.’ ”

  After his jog, Tolkachev said, he usually woke his wife and son and made them breakfast. Natasha, who worked in the antenna department of the institute, was a heavyset woman, and she often left for work before Tolkachev, in order to catch the bus. Tolkachev liked to walk to work, through the backstreets.

  Their son was growing fast and stood five inches taller than his father. Oleg had not been a rebellious teenager, but his interests ran more toward his mother’s side—arts, culture, music, and design—than toward his father’s penchant for electronics and engineering. Oleg attended a special school that emphasized English instruction. He was already reading Kipling and Asimov and was consumed with Western rock music. Adik liked his son’s music, even if he had only a very weak understanding of English. He was personally fond of jazz, which had been somewhat subversive in Soviet times.

  Adik tried to bridge the age gap with his teenage son. They went skiing together in the winter, and in the summer months the family often roughed it on camping trips around the Soviet Union. Once they went to the Baltic Sea, and another year to Lake Valdai. Because he held a security clearance, Tolkachev could not get permission to travel abroad. “I always go with my wife and son,” Tolkachev wrote to the CIA of his vacations. “We usually rest in wooded areas on rivers or lakes in a primitive manner, i.e., in camping tent, we cook on a campfire, etc. This year we also plan to go camping with a tent and backpacks.” He added, “I consider that I have the normal attachment to the family that exists in mankind.”

  Tolkachev’s imposing apartment building featured a twenty-two-story central tower with a spire, flanked by two eighteen-floor wings. Those who lived there included Mikhail Gromov, who set a world record flying over the North Pole; Georgi Lobov, a decorated World War II and Korean War fighter ace; and Sergei Anokhin, renowned for his pioneering aviation feats, such as putting a MiG-15 into a supersonic dive. Valentin Glushko, the principal designer of Soviet rocket engines, also lived there, as did Vasily Mishin, who led the Soviet effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to build a lunar rocket. They were the Soviet aviation and missile elite.3 But Tolkachev was a loner. He had once socialized with workers at his laboratory, he told the CIA, but now, “possibly because of age, all these friendly conversations started to tire me and I have practically ceased such activities.” He wrote, “During the past 10–15 years the number of my personal friends has sharply decreased. They are not out of commission … but my contacts with them have become very rare and accidental.”

  Tolkachev’s apartment was quite comfortable, with two rooms, a small kitchen, a bath, and a toilet. Above the kitchen door was the crawl space, or entresol, which ran thirteen feet long and about three feet high. In this space, he stored his camping tent, sleeping bags, and building materials, as well as his spy equipment from the CIA. His wife, slightly shorter than Adik, was not agile or tall enough to reach it, and his son had no reason to. Tolkachev kept his tools in the entresol: a gauge for checking current, a soldering iron, and wire. For wood projects, he had stowed away his drill, plane, and saw. There were three other storage areas in the apartment, all of which he had built.

  Adik was thirty years old when he married, late for a young Russian man of his generation. His wife was then twenty-two years old. Tolkachev wrote to the CIA, “I apparently belong to those who love once.”4

  Adik and Natasha lived and worked in the closed cocoon of the military-industrial complex, a sprawling archipelago of ministries, institutes, factories, and testing ranges. Tolkachev had the highest-level access to state secrets. Their way of thinking and their public behavior were governed by survival in the Soviet party-state system, which dictated conformity. By day, they played by the rules. By night, their private feelings were vastly different. Their thinking was forged in a profound moment of sorrow and loss in Natasha’s childhood, during Stalin’s purges of 1937, a loss that propelled Adik into the world of espionage.

  Natasha’s father, Ivan Kuzmin, was editor in chief of the newspaper Lyogkaya Industriya, or light industry. He put a splash of happiness on page 1 of the paper for New Year’s Day 1937, a photograph that might have come from any family, including his own: an outsized image of a beaming mother, arms hoisting high a toddler with an enormous smile and grasping a doll in one hand. A festive New Year’s tree stood behind them.

  The photograph radiates confidence in the future, but it is a posed and artificial buoyancy. The child’s arm is outstretched, beck
oning like Lenin. It is accompanied by flowery commentary which declared that the Soviet Union was being “directed by the life-giving force of socialism, the Bolshevik Party, and Stalin’s genius.”5 The newspaper was the daily chronicle of the textile industry, crammed with material from factory workers, directors, and occasionally Communist Party officials. Much of it was simply letters from worker-correspondents, each known as a rabkor, who wrote short bits and pieces about mills and factories, ideas for improved efficiency, and the use of technology and equipment. The front page often featured a large photograph of a young weaver and her success story—how she started her career at a mill, gained experience and skills, and one day suggested and introduced a method that enormously boosted efficiency. The paper printed a mixture of genuine commentary by workers and party exhortations at a time when the Soviet centrally planned economy was in a breakneck phase of industrialization. A headline declared, “It is important to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the implementation of the plan!” When a high-ranking party official or minister gave a speech, the paper often published the transcript on page 1. Page 2 carried daily tables of production—how much cotton, flax, hemp, jute, wool, silk, leather, and other materials were produced where. The third page was almost fully devoted to the ideas and suggestions of workers about how to increase production, and the newspaper was expanding its horizons to cover all aspects of light industry.