The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (10 page)

Another clue to his personality, Guilsher saw, was Tolkachev’s stubborn and determined effort to contact an American, which he now revealed in some detail to the CIA in his long letter. “The idea to pass a note by a car or in a car did not come at once,” he wrote. “At first I tried to find out if it was possible to establish communications at exhibits in which the USA participated. This turned out to be difficult since the exhibits are relatively rare and there are always many people present.” Then he went on solitary walks around central Moscow. He had spotted a car with the license plate D-04-526, the “04” indicating it was driven by Americans. This led him to decide to make contact by sliding a note through an open car window or talking to the driver. “At first,” Tolkachev recalled, “I naively thought that it is only necessary to select a convenient moment, to come up to the car, to request a conversation, and that I will be welcomed with open arms.” He added, “I started to search for a place where one could approach a car. Thus started my purposeful walks along the streets of Moscow and along Devyatinsky Lane that lasted many days and many hours.” This was the small street along the edge of the embassy compound where he had approached Hathaway.

Tolkachev had memorized a few sentences in English, just in case he encountered an American. Finally, he saw the car with the D-04-526 license plate at the gas station on Krasina Ulitsa, a street just blocks from his apartment building, on that cold evening in January 1977. “The moment was suitable,” he recalled, “deserted, at that moment there were no Soviet and no socialist bloc cars at the gas station.” He approached Fulton and repeated the English phrases he had memorized, including the question he asked Fulton, “Are you American? I would like to talk to you.” On hearing Fulton’s rebuff, “I passed a note and quickly departed.”

After dropping the note, Tolkachev recalled, he expected events to unfold rapidly, but nothing happened for months. He kept trying, over and over again, but was getting nowhere. The more Guilsher learned of Tolkachev’s story, the more he could sense this was a driven man. What propelled him was not yet entirely clear, but Tolkachev was not a casual walk-in. He was dogged and resolute.

Tolkachev also displayed an engineer’s exactitude. In his letter to the CIA, he wrote a precise account of how secret documents were handled at his institute. He drew hand sketches to illustrate it. Secret documents were kept in the First Departments, in two separate buildings—Tolkachev called them buildings one and two, located “on sketch four.” He described how an employee could receive a secret document at any time during the working day and keep it all day. The document would have to be returned by 5:00 p.m. “As a result,” he added, “it is possible to leave the institute for one and a half or two hours during the course of the day with a secret document. This must of course be done illegally, for example under an overcoat, raincoat, or suit jacket. Naturally only documents of small size can be taken out in this manner.” It was prohibited to bring a briefcase into the building, and shopping bags were checked at random, but often. A separate, classified library held the top secret scientific studies and dissertations, Tolkachev wrote. “I can make use of all the materials in the secret library.” Thus, both the First Department and the library held classified materials.

Tolkachev had identified a gaping hole in the security cordon. He could simply walk out of the institute with the documents in his coat pocket.

Guilsher had twice used dead drops to communicate with the spy, but now he learned that Tolkachev’s patience was running thin. Tolkachev said it was getting hard to explain at home why he had to run out after each phone call. Tolkachev appealed to Guilsher, saying that “psychologically” it would be better for him if they just accepted the risk and met each other periodically in person, not fooling around by stashing a dirty construction mitten behind a phone booth, where it might be found by a stranger. This was another sign of Tolkachev’s unflinching personality. If he was going to risk his life in espionage, he wanted to know and meet the person for whom he was putting himself in such danger. The impersonal dead drop gave him no chance for such contact.

Then Tolkachev made one more request. He asked the CIA for a lethal cyanide pill, to commit suicide in case he was discovered. This was known at the CIA as an L-pill. The
L
stood for “lethal.” The L-pill had been issued to Ogorodnik two years earlier, and he used it to commit suicide soon after his arrest. Guilsher realized that winning CIA headquarters’ approval for supplying one to Tolkachev was going to be very difficult. There were always fears at headquarters that an agent would panic and take the suicide pill unnecessarily or that it would be discovered and betray the spy. On May 1, headquarters cabled, “As we have on previous occasions, we would like to stall on this question.” The cable suggested it would be best for Guilsher to deflect this request in person at the next meeting with Tolkachev.
8
Guilsher wrote back on May 4 that he agreed, and “every effort will be made to stall on this question.”
9
On May 7, headquarters offered Guilsher “talking points” to discourage Tolkachev:

A. The mental burden of having this item on his person at all times.

B. The problem of concealment.

C. The risk of premature use of the item through misjudgment of an actual situation.

D. The possession of this item closes all options available in case of apprehension by authorities, even for extraneous reasons.
10

Guilsher now had a sketchy impression of Tolkachev: someone who was committed to espionage, had access to secret documents, with the organized and precise mind-set of an engineer. But Tolkachev’s requests and desires would test the outer bounds of espionage in Moscow. The CIA felt that the personal meetings that Tolkachev wanted were the riskiest method of all; just being seen with a foreigner on the street could spell trouble if spotted by a trained KGB surveillance team. Tolkachev’s demands for more money were unsettling. His “special request,” the L-pill, carried the risk of a fatal misjudgment.

Still, Guilsher concluded that Tolkachev was a solid, straightforward person, someone they could work with.

I
n his long April letter to the CIA, Tolkachev wrote disdainfully of Soviet ideology and public life. He said that politics, literature, and philosophy had been “enmeshed for a long time in such an impassable, hypocritical demagoguery” and “ideological empty talk” that he tried to ignore them. Tolkachev said he hadn’t been to a theater in a long time. Although he enjoyed classics, contemporary Soviet plays were “full of ideological gibberish.” It was a common attitude. On the street, the party’s grand declarations were etched into the concrete facades of Metro stations and factory gates, giant banners of self-congratulations. But to most Soviet citizens of the late 1970s, the promises of a bright communist future were long forgotten. These were the years of stagnation. The Soviet Union devoted such enormous resources to the arms race that its economy sputtered out only the most shoddy goods for consumers. Shortages were frequent and annoying. People waited in lines for hours to get shoes or a winter coat. Tolkachev’s high-rise apartment building at 1 Ploshchad Vosstaniya, one of Moscow’s seven distinctive, spired towers, had been constructed in 1955 with four high-ceilinged food shops at the street level, one on each corner for meat, fish, dairy, and bread. Modeled on an elegant turn-of-the-century Russian gastronome in Moscow, the four shops were resplendent with red-and-white inlaid marble, floor-to-ceiling windows, luminescent chandeliers, and mighty central columns. The goods had never been bountiful, but in the years after the shops were built it was possible to just walk in and find smoked fish and sausage. By 1979, the stores were in decay, the shelves nearly empty. Theoretically, the Soviet state provided for almost everything—medical care, schooling, transportation, work. But the system was rotting from within. The shortages forced many people to deal in a vast shadow economy, struggling to survive through friends and connections, always on the lookout for a tin of meat, some good tea, or a delivery of shoes.
1

Tolkachev’s work at the institute offered him some privileges that buffered the misery and drudgery. Once a week, he was entitled to purchase a
zakaz
, a modest food ration distributed at the office, perhaps a can of instant coffee, or scarce tea, and maybe even a smoked sausage. But he was not part of the pampered elite. He did not belong to the Communist Party, kept to himself, and had become something of an ascetic. He did not own a car, nor a country house, or dacha, when he first volunteered to the CIA. He was at the mercy of the shadow economy for such things as medicine and clothing. On weekends or after work, he and his wife would search for goods in stores and markets. In the small crawl space above the foyer, he hoarded building materials—boards, plywood, and pipes for small projects around the apartment. He enjoyed working with his hands; he repaired his own radio and television. For relaxation, he much preferred camping trips, alone with his family in the rugged wilderness of forests and lakes, than a free pass offered by the institute to a crowded, state-run resort at Sochi on the Black Sea.

When it came to things he wanted, Tolkachev’s primary focus was his son, Oleg, who was fourteen years old in 1979. Tolkachev did everything he could for him. Surrounded by empty shelves in stores, young people in the Soviet Union had developed a hunger for consumer goods. They were influenced by what they learned and heard about the West. They prized rock music and were desperate for a pair of denim jeans. The Soviet central planning system had totally neglected denim jeans and later only came up with cheap imitations. But they could be found in the shadow economy, from street hustlers, or from overseas travelers. Oleg possessed a creative and artistic bent, and he sought out Western rock music.

Tolkachev didn’t lack money. He earned 250 rubles a month, plus a 40 percent security bonus, or about 350 rubles. His wife’s salary doubled this. At the time, the average Soviet pay was some 120 rubles a month.
2
But money could not buy goods that did not exist. The Russian language has a verb meaning “to get,” which was used more commonly at the time than “to buy.” What you could get often depended not on money but on connections or on the chance that a scarce thing became available unexpectedly. For a while, there was no tea, and then it would suddenly appear. This was the world that Tolkachev knew, a party-state that congratulated itself on its greatness but that had, over decades, become a dystopia.

When Guilsher read over Tolkachev’s April letter, one section stood out. Tolkachev expressed irritation at the CIA’s proposals for paying him. Guilsher’s offer of 1,000 rubles a month was “distressing,” hardly enough, Tolkachev wrote. He wanted much more as a sign of the “significance and the importance of my work and my labor.” He promised Guilsher that he would not be reckless. He lamented, “To the present day, I have not felt adequate valuation of my lonely efforts to break down the wall of mistrust, and also the significance of the information reported by me in 1978.” Guilsher knew it was true. But he also knew the CIA was right to be cautious. They could lose the spy by rewarding him with cash when his neighbors were stuck in a daily life of shadows and shortages. Even Hathaway, the station chief, had doubts. “What the hell is he going to do with all that money?” Hathaway often asked Guilsher. “Put it up in his attic and sit there with his feet in it?”
3

Tolkachev, however, was stubborn. He at first asked for 10,000 rubles, and later 40,000 to 50,000 rubles, for the secrets he had already provided.
4
He insisted that in the future he be paid handsomely—in dollars. He demanded at least the same dollar amount as the pilot Belenko had received when he flew the Soviet MiG-25 to Japan in 1976. Tolkachev said he heard on a Voice of America broadcast that it was “six figures.”

He, too, wanted six figures.

On May 1, 1979, headquarters sent a cable to Guilsher and Hathaway outlining a new plan for paying Tolkachev a six-figure salary. “We are prepared in principle to offer him a total of $300,000,” the cable reported. But because it would be impossible for Tolkachev to store that much cash in Moscow, headquarters proposed putting the money in an interest-bearing account in the West, in either Tolkachev’s name or someone else’s name, or perhaps opening the account with $100,000 and paying him $50,000 a year for the next four years. The cable raised another possibility. “Since money is obviously not the only motivation, i.e., his comments about needing a ‘pat on the back,’ we wonder if some other form of commendation is not in order,” the cable said. “We have in mind perhaps a medal, membership in our organization, and/or a certificate of appreciation … Would any of these ‘rewards’ be psychologically effective to our cause?”
5
When Guilsher drafted the ops note he would give Tolkachev at their next meeting, set for June, he made sure to include a “well done” pat on the back. But over the next few weeks, the uncertainty deepened at headquarters about giving Tolkachev so much money. On May 18, Turner, the director of central intelligence, who had harbored such deep skepticism about human sources, approved giving Tolkachev $100,000 for his cooperation to date and “as a symbol of our good faith” while spreading payments over five years instead of four. Turner’s decision, relayed to Moscow in a cable from headquarters, added a condition: “assuming his production continues.”
6

Guilsher felt all the hand-wringing at headquarters was senseless. Tolkachev had not been a reluctant spy. He had proposed a seven-stage plan for espionage over a dozen years and seemed hell-bent on carrying it out. On May 22, Guilsher shot back to headquarters that the offer “does not dovetail” with Tolkachev’s desires. Linking the pay to his continuing production was foolish, he said, “since
cksphere
’s principal motivation is not money.” He added that Tolkachev preferred an open-ended arrangement, while the headquarters plan would end after five years. Guilsher suggested that Tolkachev be offered the $100,000 and then $40,000 a year—without conditions.
7
Guilsher hammered away at the financial details, doing everything possible to deepen Tolkachev’s trust, on the one hand, and deal with the concerns of headquarters, on the other. Guilsher wrote to Tolkachev in the ops note for their next meeting that the CIA would pay him $300,000, but the agency was worried about how to deliver it and where to put all the money. Guilsher proposed the CIA would open a savings account for Tolkachev in the West, pay him 8.75 percent interest a year, allow him to make withdrawals, and show him the passbook every time they met. Guilsher also suggested compensation by “some sort of valuables” besides money.
8

In late May 1979, a handful of American intelligence experts, mostly specialists on Soviet weapons systems, gathered for a seminar in Washington in a high-security conference room. The attendees came from the air force, the navy, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. They had each read the hundred-page secret report circulated in April describing the materials in Tolkachev’s handwritten notebook passed to Guilsher on that freezing-cold New Year’s Day.

The time had come to address the hard question: Was Tolkachev’s information genuine? The purpose of the seminar was to scrub his material for any signs of disinformation. Two and a half years had passed since Tolkachev’s first approach at the Moscow gas station, yet the intelligence agencies and the military still harbored skepticism. If Tolkachev was under the control of the KGB, if his documents were fabricated in order to send the United States off in the wrong direction, it would be calamitous to take the bait. The danger was certainly real; the KGB had a long history of skillfully using deception, disinformation, and misdirection. The United States had used the same methods against the Soviet Union.
9
At the same time, the United States was eager for insight and intelligence about Soviet military plans and intentions. If Tolkachev’s access was real and his documents genuine, the payoff could be handsome: blueprints and research files from the most advanced laboratories in the Soviet military-industrial complex. The United States enjoyed an advantage over the Soviet Union in weapons technology, but there was always a fear of surprise by the other side. The spy could provide early warning about Soviet weapons development years in the future.

After the seminar was over, a brief summary was cabled by headquarters to Guilsher and Hathaway in Moscow. The summary reported that Tolkachev’s documents, notes, and drawings offered a revealing glimpse into the long-closed world of Soviet military planning. “All participants reported that they were impressed with the product, to the extent that all checkable information is considered logical,” the summary reported. “There is no factual statement that can be refuted. You will be pleased to know that
cksphere
’s product provided the frame to pull together all the bits and pieces of apparent extraneous information collected heretofore so that a complete picture can now be made of Soviet advancement in this particular field. It is estimated that the product has saved us five years of R&D time.”
10
The specific field of Soviet “advancement” referred to here is not known precisely but was probably avionics and radars, including “look-down, shoot-down,” as this was Tolkachev’s area.

At that moment, the Defense Department’s annual total budget for research and development, testing, and engineering was more than $12 billion, most of it for the air force and the navy to confront the Soviet threat with new and modernized weapons. By saving five years of spending, Tolkachev, in his first major delivery to Guilsher, had passed documents worth, at least, millions of dollars to the United States, and likely much more. The experts at the seminar were enthusiastic enough to draw up more questions to be passed to Tolkachev at the next meeting.
11
Hathaway recalled that when Tolkachev’s materials arrived at headquarters, “People went wild. The military said, good God, where did you get that? Let’s have more of it!”

In Moscow, Guilsher was getting ready for the upcoming rendezvous in June. “As you well understand,” Guilsher wrote to Tolkachev, “your information is of critical interest to us and the small group of officials, at the highest levels, who are aware of your work, has asked me to extend their highest appreciation for your work, their highest esteem for you personally and an assurance that your product is of the highest value.” Guilsher knew that Tolkachev was taking huge risks and reassured him that “your information, due to its very sensitive nature, is receiving very limited distribution under the highest classification and is only seen by the specialists who have the need to see it.”
12

The hundred-page summary of Tolkachev’s intelligence had been printed in only seven copies, kept under tight security. The names of those who saw the intelligence were recorded on a registry known as a “bigot list” stored with the reports and requirements staff of the CIA’s Soviet division. When it was translated and distributed, the Tolkachev material was often blended with other intelligence from other sources from the Soviet Union, so if there was a leak, Tolkachev could not be fingered as the source.
13
When sending cables from Moscow, the station routinely encrypted them, but in the case of Tolkachev extra precautions were taken. Any identifying information such as names, ages, locations, or physical characteristics in the cables was double encrypted. For example, a mention of Oleg would be changed to Alex before the cable was fully scrambled for transmission to headquarters. At Langley, the cable was unscrambled and the proper names or words put back in. That way, if the KGB had managed to intercept the cable, they still would not have a name or clue leading them to the agent’s identity. Only a handful of people at headquarters knew the true identity of
cksphere
.
14

On June 6, Guilsher met Tolkachev face-to-face for the third time. When Guilsher spotted him, Tolkachev was wearing a dark tan raincoat with a yellow-and-brown-plaid shirt. After they exchanged paroles—a phrase known only to each of them, such as “Boris sends regards”—Tolkachev gave Guilsher twenty-nine pages of handwritten notes and ten exposed film cassettes from the Molly miniature camera.