The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (20 page)

On a cold morning in Washington, January 15, 1981, five days before Reagan was to take the oath, Turner, the outgoing CIA director, arrived at Blair House, the historic guest quarters across the street from the White House, where Reagan was staying. He was met by Reagan, the vice president elect, George H. W. Bush, who had been CIA director before Turner, and Casey. The occasion was Turner’s final intelligence briefing, to share with the new president the nation’s most closely guarded and sensitive intelligence secrets. As they sat in a private room, Turner outlined a covert action program in Afghanistan to support the fighters opposing the Soviet occupation. He described how U.S. Navy submarines had secretly tapped Soviet underwater communications cables. These were truly audacious operations. But the jewel of all jewels, he told Reagan, was a human source who worked in a Moscow military research institute. He not only provided hard documentation of Soviet radar and avionics capabilities in the present but also revealed research and development a decade into the future. His name was Adolf Tolkachev, and his intelligence was worth billions.
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Two months later, on March 10, 1981, the beat-up old beige-and-green Volkswagen van rattled out of the U.S. embassy compound in Moscow. Once again in disguise, Rolph slipped past the guards. His mission, to meet Tolkachev, was extremely delicate because he was carrying Discus, the CIA’s electronic messaging device. Rolph did not want to get caught with it, nor did he want the KGB to ever lay their hands on one. For fifty minutes, he watched for possible surveillance from the van, zigzagging around town. Rolph heard some KGB transmissions on his radio, but they seemed unrelated to him. He then took off the disguise, stepped onto the street, and walked for an hour, listening carefully and watching. No signs of surveillance anywhere. At 9:05 p.m., he arrived at a meeting site, code-named
anna
, located in a park, and spotted Tolkachev, standing at a phone booth. He and Tolkachev began to walk and talk, choosing paths randomly through the park. A few people walking dogs and just strolling saw them but paid no attention.
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Rolph informed Tolkachev that the CIA had accepted his plan for the money. It was a deal—no questions asked. Tolkachev seemed satisfied and said no more about it.

Tolkachev reported that the CIA’s replica of the library permission sheet was excellent. He had already replaced it, but the building pass was still not right. The color of the cover was off; it would not work. The cover and the inside page holding his photograph were made of different materials that the CIA had not adequately replicated. Nor did they properly reproduce the color of the swirls on the inside paper.

Rolph handed Tolkachev another parcel. Inside, he said, you’ll find the
elektronniy pribor
, the electronic equipment, or the Discus. Be very careful, Rolph insisted, and read all the instructions before using it. Rolph repeated, “Read the instructions,” and Tolkachev said he understood. Rolph also emphasized that Discus was for use when there was an urgent message that could not wait until their next meeting. He tried to keep the tone upbeat and confident: we want you to use it, he said, perhaps over the summer when we are not meeting regularly.
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Rolph did not reveal to Tolkachev that he and Gerber had serious doubts about whether Discus would be useful at all. In the Moscow station, one of the most basic principles of espionage was don’t ever carry out operational acts without a solid justification. The Discus required operational acts, but for what? Tolkachev’s great value was in the thousands of documents he copied, not short electronic bursts. As a practical matter, the CIA never had time to train Tolkachev or practice on the device with him.
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Gerber and Hathaway argued back and forth for months about Discus. Hathaway was a headstrong believer. The CIA’s prized spy in Warsaw, Ryszard Kuklinski, was given an earlier version, called Iskra. Despite some malfunctions, Kuklinski used it to warn the CIA in January 1981 that plans were being drawn up for the Polish military in the event of martial law. In response, Hathaway sent a congratulatory note to the Warsaw station. “I hope this is the first of many, many more to come,” he wrote. Later, after a second Kuklinski transmission, headquarters cabled to the Warsaw station that the spy “obviously likes his new toy.”
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Hathaway felt that Tolkachev would like it too. The dream, to use technology for covert communications, was broadly shared among operational people at headquarters. They always attempted to push beyond where the KGB might be looking. In covert communications, that sometimes meant deploying an early version of technology, like the Discus; the thinking was that the most secret of all technologies is the one that the other person doesn’t suspect exists.
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But Gerber responded that it was never that simple. Moscow case officers were under surveillance far more than in Warsaw. Why scramble a station officer for a message that might say, “Hello, all is fine”?

Despite the doubts, the Moscow station complied with Hathaway’s request. The Discus was now in Tolkachev’s hands. Rolph also gave him forty-two AA batteries.

Tolkachev handed over fifty-five rolls of 35 mm film that he had taken since their last meeting. He told Rolph that he might have only five to ten more rolls by June and didn’t anticipate much production over the summer; with the warm weather, he could not wear the overcoat to hide the documents at lunchtime. He also planned a monthlong vacation.

Rolph knew that a lot of what Tolkachev planned to steal for the CIA had already been taken, well ahead of his own seven-stage, twelve-year schedule.
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But just as Tolkachev reached this point, the appetite at headquarters was mushrooming. They seemed to want Tolkachev to produce fifty or a hundred rolls of film every time. Rolph was irritated at the demands but could see what was happening. Tolkachev’s material was so valuable back at Langley that he was literally “paying the rent”—justifying the CIA’s operational budget—and helping the agency satisfy the military customers. So headquarters was naturally inclined to push the envelope. They asked,
can he just check out a few more things?
Rolph felt that Tolkachev had single-handedly built a Brooklyn Bridge, and now headquarters wanted him to build a Golden Gate Bridge as well. Still, Rolph carried a letter that had been sent by headquarters, with a list of forty-five wide-ranging questions about Soviet weapons systems. He gave it to Tolkachev and asked for answers at their next meeting.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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