National Security is Everyone's Business

April 18th, 2024 | 1:39 PM ET

Review: CIA’s Most Valuable Spy

Posted: August 27th, 2015

By John Sipher

John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment. John served multiple overseas tours as Chief of Station and Deputy Chief of Station in Europe, Asia, and in high-threat environments. He is the recipient of CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal.

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 Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+

Categorized as:Perspectives & CultureTagged with:

Related Articles

Xi’s Awful Arithmetic

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT VIEW — Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence […] More

June 9th, 2020 by Mark Kelton

NATO Imagines Future Warfare

Innovation is a key component of readiness when it comes to future threats. NATO’s Innovation Hub recently commissioned a short story from author August Cole, […] More

May 14th, 2020

Search

Close