For years, when I was asked to describe the intensity of the relationship between a CIA handler and his/her foreign sources, I would often refer to a seminal spy case handled on the streets of Moscow in the early 1980s. I told the story of an agent whose efforts to steal documents for passage to the CIA had become so dangerous that he would place a CIA issued suicide pill into his mouth, between his cheek and gums, every time he was called into the office of his Soviet boss, for fear that he might be exposed and ambushed by the KGB. Following the meeting, he would take it back out and hide it away while he continued his spying.
Now David Hoffman has written a book about that heroic spy, Adolf Tolkachev.
“The Billion Dollar Spy” is an in depth look at one of CIA’s most prolific spies during the Cold War, based upon recently declassified documents and interviews with the participants.
It tells the story of the CIA’s relationship with Tolkachev, a Soviet Defense researcher who approached CIA officers in Moscow in 1979 offering to steal information from his classified institute. The relationship lasted six years, and he provided tens of thousands of pages of detailed information on Soviet radars, air defense and avionics— information that helped the U.S. military shape its research and procurement for the following decades.
Tolkachev was arrested in 1985 and was executed the following year.
The fruits of Tolkachev's spying were assessed by experts in the Air Force to be worth multiple billions of dollars and of such value that they could have literally meant the difference between victory and defeat if the Cold War turned hot. A Defense Department memorandum to the CIA upon receipt of Tolkachev’s material noted that, even if Tolkachev was captured and the Soviets uncovered the espionage, the value of the information would not diminish for at least 8-10 years, for it would take that long for the Soviets to design and deploy new technology.
Since Tolkachev worked in a closed, classified facility in Moscow and could not meet with his American handlers outside of Russia, the book lacks some of the human details that would have been available if the spy lived or was able to travel to the West. Instead, CIA’s relationship with Tolkachev took place during infrequent, short clandestine meetings on the streets of Moscow, with secret notes passed during these meetings.
Nonetheless, the audaciousness of the CIA’s efforts to meet him, the bravery of Tolkachev, and the detailed depictions of CIA’s on-the-street tradecraft in Moscow makes the book worth a read.
Hoffman does an excellent job of describing the deadly dance between the massive KGB efforts to thwart U.S. intelligence operatives, and the CIA’s endeavors to stay one step ahead and operate under the noses of their KGB watchers.
It wasn’t an easy task. The Russians employed the resources that only a Communist dictatorship could muster in an effort to thwart U.S. spies. The KGB deployed constant and oppressive surveillance; bugged houses, phones, and cars; used spy dust, tracking dogs, airplanes, police, video and thermal monitoring of the Embassy and residences; and coerced Russians to report all their contact with Americans
In order to maintain the relationship with Tolkachev, the CIA relied on short meetings in darkened alleys following imaginative and meticulously planned escape scenarios, utilizing disguise and grueling multi-hour efforts to insure that they were free of surveillance.
Communication included secret writing, messages passed in old, smelly construction gloves, miniature cameras, and unique communication gear, many of which were the forerunners of today's technology. At one point the CIA even worked with magicians to help hide their actions with sleight of hand techniques.
One such maneuver was the use of the Jack-in-the-Box (JIB), pop-up dummy head and torso that was used to fool trailing surveillance vehicles – the espionage version of a passenger seat dummy to illegally use highway HOV lanes.
The CIA used the trick maneuver in their first attempt to make contact with Tolkachev following a series of missed meetings due to heavy KGB surveillance of CIA officers on the streets of Moscow.
CIA officer Bill Plunkert left the Embassy with his wife carrying a fake birthday cake hiding the JIB. After driving a pre-determined route designed to lull KGB surveillance, Plunkert jumped out of the car at a spot where he had a five second interval when the trailing KGB surveillance cars would be out of sight. As he donned a disguise and disappeared, his wife opened the birthday cake and deployed the JIB device in the empty seat in order to trick the trailing surveillance vehicles.
It worked, and allowed Plunkert to meet Tolkachev in person for the first time after almost two years of thwarted efforts.
Ironically, it was the same maneuver that a resentful former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard used to escape the FBI and defect to the Soviet Union after passing Tolkachev's identity to the KGB. Howard had been read into the Tolkachev case while training to deploy to Moscow, but had been fired by CIA for security breaches before his posting was to begin.
Tolkachev was arrested, tried, and shot in 1986. Sadly, he was unable to get to his suicide pill when he was arrested.
Even the KGB offered grudging praise for the operation. As outlined in a monograph by former CIA officer Barry Royden, the Moscow based newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya in February 1990 wrote:
CIA provided Tolkachev with a cleverly compiled meeting schedule. CIA instructors made provisions for even the tiniest of details . . . the miniature camera came with detailed instructions and a light meter . . . Let us give CIA experts the credit due them—they worked really hard to find poorly illuminated and deserted places in Moscow for meetings with Tolkachev . . .. Anyone unfamiliar with CIA’s tricks would never imagine that, if a light were to burn behind a certain window in the US Embassy, this could be a coded message for a spy . . . Langley provided touching care for its agent—if he needed medicine, everything was provided . . . In every instruction efficiently setting out his assignment, they checked up on his health and went to great pains to stress how much they valued him and how concerned they were for his well-being.
