The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (18 page)

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 possible.

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.

L
ate 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 often. 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.

In his last review of the plan with Gerber, hours earlier in the Moscow station, Rolph went over the route, the contingencies—each turn, each cover stop. What Rolph remembered was how Gerber treated every operation as if it were his own. He thought of the smallest details: body language, gestures, appearances, and illusions. Rolph once thought he’d never find another chief of station like Gus Hathaway, the tireless operator. Then he worked for Gerber, an intense, precise choreographer of espionage.

The van stopped at a flower shop. Rolph remained in his seat. Buying flowers was a routine, their first cover stop, a pause to see if the surveillance cars or foot patrol teams would get careless and stumble over themselves. Rolph kept his disguise on, in case they were questioned, but did not go into the flower shop, knowing that the harsh white light could expose the imperfections. Better to remain veiled behind the dirty window in the van.

The first cover stop had an important function: the abort option. If there was surveillance, Rolph could always break off here and go home with minimal losses; the KGB would have no inkling that he was headed to a meeting with an agent. By experience, Rolph had learned it was always best to catch the KGB at the start of a run, when they were more easily detected. If you saw the same red car three times, that was a clue. But as time passed, detection became more difficult. If the KGB was suspicious, they could throw more cars and more teams into the hunt. This made Moscow different from other cities. Rolph had the advantage in knowing where he was going, but the KGB had limitless resources they could devote to the chase if they became suspicious. They could put a dozen cars on his tail, and he would not see the same one twice.

The first part of a surveillance detection run was always in a moving vehicle, for more control. In the VW van, Rolph and the chief tech enjoyed nearly 360-degree vision and plenty of agility. They could accelerate, forcing the KGB watchers to keep up and perhaps reveal themselves. Or they could make abrupt U-turns, perhaps coming face-to-face with the surveillance car, if it existed. The KGB always sent out teams of three and four cars, so the goal was to trip them up, maneuver so they would have to show their presence early. Time and distance could be leveraged to Rolph’s advantage. It was a lesson that Haviland Smith and his peers had discovered in the 1960s.

After an hour and a half of driving, darkness had settled over the city, and Rolph began a mental countdown. His next move required a decision based on what he had seen and his instincts. The rule of thumb was to advance to the next stage only if he was 95 percent certain he was black. The reason was simple: he had the upper hand in the car. On foot and alone, he would be much more vulnerable. Rolph had known case officers who could not cross this threshold. They would “feel” surveillance, even if they had not seen it, and turn back. They were never criticized for this; it might have been a good call. But the decision to go ahead, to take the risk of a meeting with an agent, was much harder. The agent’s life was at risk. Rolph weighed what he had seen on the darkening streets. He was 95 percent sure he was free from surveillance. He looked to the chief tech, who agreed. While the van was still moving, Rolph quickly slipped off the disguise and put it into a small sack on the floor. He grabbed the shopping bag that had been prepared for Tolkachev and slipped into a woolen coat. The van stopped very briefly. Rolph slid out and walked briskly away. The chief tech went to look for a quiet place to hide the van and take a walk in the park.

Soon, Rolph reappeared on another broad avenue a few blocks away, and he walked directly into a crowd waiting for one of the electric trolley buses that prowled Moscow’s major arteries. He boarded the trolley at the rear door. To an outsider, Rolph resembled just another tired worker going home, standing wearily, squeezed in tightly. But in reality he was watching every move around him. No one on the bus could see it, but the small radio device in his ear was wirelessly connected to a receiver, about the size of a thin cigarette pack, held in the pocket of a white cotton harness that wrapped around his chest. A necklace of wire served as antenna and also handled the connection to the earpiece. In earlier years, case officers had to rather clumsily plug in crystals that might pick up a KGB transmission, and it was hit or miss. But Rolph was wearing a new model that scanned multiple KGB bands automatically. It gave him a leg up on the KGB; he could listen to them as they talked to each other. The downside was that it was so sensitive that it picked up squelches, jibs, and jabs of a dozen or more surveillance teams that could be three-quarters of a mile away and may not be following him, or even know about him. The radio was a wonder of concealment and smarts, but it was a secondary tool; it could provide warning of surveillance but not prove Rolph was free from it. Confirming that he was free from surveillance was the single most critical factor in what he was about to do.

Rolph scanned the trolley passengers, taking careful note of those who boarded with him. Then he abruptly stepped toward the door and jumped off at the next stop, watching to see who followed. So far, nothing seemed out of place.

On foot, he began the final stage of the surveillance detection run. Rolph was physically fit, and his head was clear, but his year in Moscow had taught him that surveillance detection runs were grueling. The late autumn weather felt raw, moist, and heavy. After he spent hours walking in the open air, his lungs ached. His mouth grew dry, but there was nowhere he could safely stop. Every doorway or public space could be a trap, and Rolph knew that the KGB peered down at sidewalks and streets from telescopes mounted in windows above. They had thousands of people watching.

The radio scanner was quiet but for the usual patter and static. At a small theater, Rolph pivoted on his heel and pushed open the doors. This was his second cover stop. He checked out the play board and notices on the wall, without saying anything. He almost never came to this theater. He listened intently to the radio but heard nothing. His goal was to force the KGB men to do something out of character, to slip, so that he could spot them before they could call in reinforcements and blanket the streets. Rolph left the theater with tickets for a show he had no intention to attend. The real show was coming up soon. The theater had triggered no sign of surveillance.

The next cover stop would certainly send the KGB into fits, should they see him. Rolph avoided the Metro—there were monitoring cameras inside most stations—and walked toward an antiques store, far from his usual routines. He had been there once before, with his family, but he would never go to an antiques store alone at night during the week. The point was to ramp up his challenge to the KGB, forcing them to act.

Still nothing.

He walked into a nearby apartment building and started climbing the stairs. This would trigger a KGB ambush if they were following him. They could not allow him to disappear from sight in a multi-floor apartment building. In fact, Rolph had nowhere to go in the building and knew not a soul who lived there. He was just trying to provoke the KGB. At a landing on the stairs, he sat down and waited.

No one came running up the stairs.

Rolph turned around. For three and a half hours, the KGB had been nowhere in sight. Still, to make sure, he walked to a small park near the apartment building. The park was lined with benches. Tall apartment buildings loomed on all sides, leaving the benches in darkness. Rolph hoped that his presence in the park, so far from home or the embassy, would raise hackles, and if nearby, the KGB would leap out and grab him. Better to face them now than to take them to Tolkachev. He carried no passport, no identification, but he did not fear being caught. He could explain being in a park, and they would be no wiser. But he must not lead the KGB to Tolkachev. Rolph looked at his watch. He was twelve minutes from the meeting site.

Time to go. He was 100 percent sure. He rose from the bench.

Suddenly he was jolted by a squelch in his earpiece, then another, and a third. They were loud, clearly from the KGB’s surveillance teams. Rolph didn’t know why. Did they see him stand up? He stood frozen, rigid, tense. The squelch could sometimes be used as a signal, without words, from one KGB man to another. But the noise could also have been related to something else, on a street a half mile away. It could have been a ham-fisted operator who hit his button by mistake.