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

by David E. Hoffman

  The CIA wrestled with whether to give Tolkachev new miniature spy cameras for use at his office. The station pointed out that the small Tropel spy cameras had improved somewhat; the minimum light was now twenty-five foot-candles. Headquarters was worried that sooner or later another Phazotron worker would see—one time too many—that Tolkachev was hunched over, elbows on his desk, hands clasping something, and grow suspicious. Tolkachev would “have to do any photography in the presence of other people,” headquarters cautioned. “This of course is an extremely risky endeavor, and would require tremendous discretion and caution by cksphere, and is not likely to help his blood pressure, either.”35

  But headquarters gave in. The Tropel cameras would be sent to Moscow.36

  15

  Not Caught Alive

  In the morning on April 26, 1983, the head designer at the institute, Yuri Kirpichev, called Tolkachev into his office to discuss some routine problems. Kirpichev was Tolkachev’s superior. As they were talking, the phone rang. Kirpichev picked it up and, after several minutes of silence, asked the caller, “For what purpose do you need this?”

  Then he added, “Very well, I’ll do it.”

  The phone call had come from Nikolai Balan, head of the “regime,” the overarching security office at the institute. The regime, which reported to the KGB, controlled the First Department and secret library and the clearance process for all workers. Every ten years, each employee had to answer a lengthy questionnaire. The questionnaires were then sent to the KGB for review and decisions about who would get top secret clearance. Tolkachev had the highest-level access.

  The regime also was responsible for guards and building passes. The regime existed in every secret Soviet enterprise.

  After the call, Kirpichev summoned the leading engineer at the institute, who had worked on the target recognition system for the No. 19 radar that would go into the MiG-29 fighter.

  As Tolkachev listened, terrified, Kirpichev described the call. “By the end of the day,” he said, Balan wanted “a list of persons familiar with the recognition system or having access to information about the recognition system with the RLS No. 19.”

  This was the information that Tolkachev had passed to the CIA in March.

  “For what is this needed?” asked the leading engineer, protesting that they had never been asked to compile such lists before.

  Kirpichev said he had asked the same question of Balan, who “answered me with nothing that was intelligible.”

  Tolkachev went back to his office, his head spinning. He felt paralyzed. He turned the conversation over and over in his mind, wondering whether he had been discovered. His first worry was about the handwritten notes on the target recognition system he had given the CIA. The notes had been returned to him, but had the CIA slipped up? Had someone else seen them?1

  Tolkachev tried to come to grips with what he heard. If Balan was demanding a list of employees, that suggested a very serious leak of information about the target recognition system. But what did they know about the source? Did the KGB have a suspect, or were they just fishing?2

  He concluded that one possibility was that the KGB had no idea where the information had come from. Actually, there were dozens of potential sources: institutes in Moscow, including his own and several others, or aviation and electronics factories far away that built radars and parts for them, located in the cities of Kazan, Ryazan, and Khmelnitsky. In that case, it would take time to investigate.

  Another possibility, more ominous and frightening, was that they were closing in on him. If so, Tolkachev figured they would need only one or two days. By nightfall, the security office would already have a list of employees with access to the material. By the next day, the list would be sent to the KGB.

  If they had managed to intercept Tolkachev’s papers given to the CIA—he had written the information by hand—then it would be a simple matter to compare the handwriting with his answers on the clearance questionnaire, also written out in hand. Anyone could do it in a few hours. His last clearance questionnaire was completed in 1980.

  Tolkachev made some hurried decisions. He would destroy everything the CIA had given him that could be incriminating, and he would not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of the KGB, at least not alive.

  He told his supervisor he would not be coming to work the next day. He didn’t say why.

  The next morning, April 27, after his wife and son left the apartment, Tolkachev gathered up all the spy gear and materials hidden in the entresol: the Pentax cameras and clamp, the dead drop and signal instructions, the dissident books, the bricks of rubles, the Discus, the shortwave radio demodulator—everything, including the L-pill and the schedule of future meetings. He loaded it all into the Zhiguli and drove out of Moscow. There wasn’t time to signal the CIA or ask for a meeting.

  He crossed the outer Moscow ring road and drove into the country, heading north on the Rogachevskoye Shosse, or highway. Soon the metropolis of concrete and asphalt gave way to thick forests and open fields. He turned eastward off the highway onto a narrow road, then northeast onto another country road that, after five miles, took a slow, lazy curve, revealing a small, rural village, Doronino. Only six houses stood by the road. One of them was a summer house, or dacha, that Tolkachev and his wife had leased in 1981.

  When they were younger, they traveled widely around the Soviet Union, backpacking and camping, but now that they had a car, the dacha made more sense. It was common for people in the city to acquire houses in half-abandoned villages and repair them. Property rights were highly questionable; buying or selling a property was strictly forbidden, but there were other means. Tolkachev made a deal that was something like a lease.3 The houses were not expensive, but they demanded time and effort to fix up. Tolkachev searched for scarce construction materials and repaired the house himself, which he enjoyed. The house was about fifty miles from the city.4

  An old iron stove stood in the center of the house. Tolkachev pulled the spy gear out of the Zhiguli, fired up the stove, and burned everything—including the rubles the CIA had given him, the instructions, the books, the cameras, everything except for the meeting schedule and the suicide pill inside the fountain pen.

  When the fire cooled, Tolkachev realized that some metal parts from the Discus had not burned. He gathered them up.

  As he drove back toward Moscow, he tossed the metal parts out the window, into the roadside ditch. What remained of the CIA’s most sophisticated agent communications device was scattered into the weeds.

  Tolkachev returned home. He took the CIA meeting schedule and copied it, using codes, into a magazine he kept at home, Nauka i Zhizn (Science and life), and then destroyed the original schedule, too.

  On April 28, before going to work, Tolkachev took out the pen with the L-pill concealed inside and put it in his pocket so he could grab it quickly if needed. He thought to himself that the most likely place for his arrest would be Kirpichev’s office. He figured he would be summoned, and as he opened the door, the KGB would pull his hands behind his back so he could not grab the pen.

  For the next several days, as a precaution, Tolkachev removed the fragile capsule from the pen and held it under his tongue every time Kirpichev summoned him to the office.

  The arrest never came.

  Tolkachev didn’t signal the CIA at the time, but he wrote a long, detailed account about what happened, to pass at their next meeting in the autumn. He wrote that if the KGB already had his handwritten notes on the MiG-29 target recognition system, “then no measures would help me.” But he added, “If I successfully did away with my materials in time, then the KGB will not be able to find documentary evidence of my relationship with you.” If the KGB was embarking on a broad search for the source of a leak, there was nothing in the house or at the dacha that would be compromising.

  After some time passed with no arrest, Tolkachev concluded that
the KGB investigation was not focused directly on him. His panic subsided. But just to be safe, he decided to carry the L-pill in his pocket whenever he went to see the CIA case officer and whenever carrying secret documents from work.

  Tolkachev was the Moscow station’s crown jewel of human source intelligence collection, but the station had another top secret asset, an espionage operation of a different kind. Not a human source, it was a machine and another tangible sign of how far CIA intelligence collection had come in Moscow since the years of paralysis in the 1960s.

  The operation was code-named ckelbow, and it ranks as one of the most ingenious and daring of the Cold War. The heart of it was the underground wiretap on the sensitive data line running from the nuclear weapons facility at Troitsk to the Defense Ministry in Moscow. The CIA and the National Security Agency placed a listening tap on the cable by sneaking into one of the manholes along the route. All the case officers in Moscow had trained on the manhole mock-up back in the United States; David Rolph had broken his thumb in the effort. Once the operation got under way, James Olson was the first to climb into the manhole in August 1979 for a survey and to take photographs. Later, a technical operations officer went down, to test which of the lead-sheathed lines should be tapped. After that, another technical officer installed the actual wiretap. The CIA cleverly concealed the device so it could not be detected by routine maintenance workers. It began to suck out the data from the cable and transmit them to a recording device the CIA had buried between two trees, twelve feet away. Every once in a while, the Moscow station sent a case officer to swap out the recorder and collect the data, a mission undertaken with all the precautions of meeting a human spy. The recording device ran on its own power source and stored huge amounts of data until it was retrieved. To deter the curious, the CIA stuck a warning label on the recorder in Russian that said, “Danger: High Voltage,” and the recorder was protected by its own tamper-sensing alarm to silently warn a CIA case officer, at a distance, if anything had disturbed it. The operation cost the United States some $20 million.5

  For all the technical wizardry, ckelbow still required tending by people. On a pleasant Saturday in June 1983, it was up to Bob Morris to get the machine safely out of the ground and back to the station. Morris and his wife began the mission by carrying a box of sodas out to their car for a picnic in the countryside. Inside the box was concealed a plain backpack, and inside the backpack, the replacement recorder, a collapsible shovel, and animal repellent. After a long surveillance detection run, they took a bus, then a trolley, and began to hike by foot. Morris hefted the heavy backpack on his shoulders, and they both donned a light disguise to look more like Russians just out for fresh air. They walked during the afternoon until they reached two rows of trees, a windbreak, and, beyond the trees, an expansive field. Twilight was settling in. While his wife, who was also on a contract with the CIA, served as lookout, Morris searched for the spot—a break in one tree line—where the recorder was located. He had never been to the location before but had studied satellite photographs. He found the recorder quickly and began to dig. His wife stood watch. Morris pulled the old recorder from the ground and was securing the new one when he suddenly saw his wife shudder, as if she were about to let out a scream.

  She gasped, and Morris turned his head sharply. He saw that two wild kittens had leaped out of the bushes and startled her. They were only weeks old and playful. Morris and his wife tried to remain silent and not break out laughing.

  Morris secured the new recorder in the hole, lodged in some animal repellent, connected the wires, and covered it. The animal repellent was to keep out rodents. The CIA experimented with using tiger feces, actually acquired in India, thinking that the scent of tigers might scare away any animal. It didn’t work; the other animals didn’t seem to care whether there was a tiger in the woods or not.

  Morris put the old recorder into the backpack and cleaned up the site to cover their tracks, and they retraced their steps—bus, trolley, then, as they approached the parked car, they changed back to their picnic clothes. Morris put the backpack and the old recorder into the soda box and closed it, and they drove home. He carried the soda box past the Soviet militiamen and up to his apartment. The next day, the old recorder was passed by others to the station.

  Morris breathed a deep sigh of relief. Nothing quite readied him for the stress and strain of working deep cover in Moscow.

  He had largely escaped notice by the KGB, but in the autumn of 1983 he began to come under more surveillance. The next scheduled meeting with Tolkachev was set for September 20, but Morris had to abort because of surveillance. The fortochka was open to signal for a meeting on October 4, but Tolkachev did not show up. He signaled for a meeting on October 21, but there was surveillance, and the CIA had to abort. Tolkachev signaled for a phone call as a precursor to a meeting on October 27, and a case officer went out and called his apartment three times but only reached his son and his wife. Again on November 3, the fortochka was open, but Tolkachev didn’t show. Morris, still under deep cover, was growing frustrated. For each meeting, there was an alternate window of time, an hour later. Each time Tolkachev didn’t show, Morris would leave, stay black for an hour, and return at the alternate time, but to no avail. Morris had gone through the long surveillance detection runs, his adrenaline was pumping, and then—nothing. There was no explanation. One missed meeting was understandable, but from September to November 1983 five attempts to meet Tolkachev had failed.

  Finally, on the evening of November 16, Morris broke through. He met Tolkachev at the streetcar stop where they had first encountered each other. Both felt immensely relieved. As they walked toward Tolkachev’s car, Morris asked about the missed meetings. Tolkachev explained that he had come twice but had not seen Morris. He said his wife had opened the fortochka on three of the dates when he didn’t show up. It was useless to use the telephone anymore, he said; between his teenage son and his wife, the phone was constantly engaged, and in any case there was no privacy.

  In the car, Tolkachev had no film and said security was still tight at work. It was all explained in his ops note, he said, but he would not attempt any document photography for a while.

  The two were thrilled to reconnect. Morris gave Tolkachev a package from the Moscow station that included two Tropel cameras, hidden in key fobs, and a new light meter. In a note, the CIA told Tolkachev that the tiny cameras had been improved somewhat to twenty-five foot-candles of illumination. Morris didn’t dwell on the packages; he wanted to know about Tolkachev’s health and well-being. At the end of the meeting, Morris said, “I can’t begin to tell you how happy I was to see you tonight.” Tolkachev replied, “Yes, I feel exactly the same way.”

  It was Tolkachev’s eighteenth meeting with the CIA.6

  The station was upbeat, at first, in cables to headquarters. “Meeting went perfectly in all respects and cksphere is fine,” the station reported. “The conversation during the meeting was lively and good natured; cksphere seemed to be in a good mood.”

  But the bad news came as soon as the ops note was translated. In the note, Tolkachev described in detail the scare of the spring—the investigation, burning everything in the dacha’s iron stove, the poison pill under his tongue. The scare reignited all the old anxieties about Tolkachev. “It is painfully obvious,” the station told headquarters, “that cksphere considers himself to be in great danger and his security situation continues to deteriorate.

  “We are certain you will be as stunned as we are after you read it.”

  Tolkachev reported to the CIA that by autumn he had concluded that the KGB was carrying out a broad investigation, not directed specifically at him. Yet he felt it was possible they were still pursuing someone. Tolkachev said he was in a “waiting position” and, at least for a while, could not bring the CIA any more material about the MiG-29 target recognition system. He reported that workers in the First Department had begun making unannounced sp
ot checks in his laboratory to find out if secret documents were misplaced in any way. At the same time, all employees were asked to submit new photographs—a new building pass “is in the works.”

  In a tone that was apologetic, Tolkachev said, “I was forced to take maximum care” in the emergency, and he was still not certain what triggered the investigation. He said he could provide no more documents until the next year. Tolkachev expressed a willingness to copy out passages of secret documents by hand, but that would not be easy. He had previously done the writing in the quiet of the Lenin Library after work, but lately he was too tired to go there in the evenings and unable to explain to his family why he was late. With the spot checks by the First Department, he said, it was risky to copy secret information by hand into notebooks on his work desk.

  Tolkachev also revealed he was suffering from a new health problem. His broken nose from a hockey accident as a youth had not bothered him for years, but now he could barely breathe through his nose, and “it is beginning to make me very uncomfortable.” It ruined his sleep and left him tired during the day. He warned the CIA that he might have an operation on his nose that would change his appearance. But they could recognize him by a familiar practice. Going to a meeting with a case officer, he said, “I will always hold in my left hand” a light-colored book, usually white.7

  The CIA was shocked by Tolkachev’s account of the scare. Headquarters called it “a chilling account” and added in a cable to the Moscow station, “We share your profound dismay and can only imagine the agony with which cksphere has lived since late April, 1983.” But there wasn’t much they could do now. The next scheduled meeting was five months away, in April 1984. The Moscow station said that perhaps they should instruct Tolkachev to bury his Tropel cameras. But Tolkachev no longer had any communications gear, so there was no easy way to get him a message, unless he called for, or agreed to, an unscheduled meeting before April.8