The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (16 page)

O
n the day in July 1979 that he arrived in Moscow as a new case officer, David Rolph took the elevator in the U.S. embassy to the ninth floor, walked past the marine guards, through the chancery, then down a back stairs to the seventh floor. There, at the landing, the door on the right opened to the embassy political section. On the left, an unmarked door had a cipher lock. Rolph punched in the code. After the first door, he saw a second one that looked like a bank vault. It had a combination lock but was open during the day when people were inside. He walked down a short hallway, past the small alcove on the left with the paper shredder. Turning to the right, he grabbed the lever on another door and opened it with the soft whoosh of an air lock. He entered a windowless rectangular box of a room, with a low ceiling, shielded in corrugated metal and isolated from the embassy walls to avoid eavesdropping or penetration. This was the Moscow station.

David Rolph was thirty-one years old and filled with anticipation. He was beginning his first tour for the CIA, and he yearned for an operation of his own, to get out on the streets and run an agent.

At one end of the station, the station chief worked from a cramped office with a desk, a safe, and a small conference table barely large enough for the case officers to squeeze around. The rest of the station was jammed with their desks, lined up along each side, typewriters, file cabinets protected by combination locks, and maps of Moscow on the walls. One large map was covered with colored, numbered dots to indicate meeting sites, signal sites, dead drop locations, and who was responsible for each. Music drifted from a cassette player. Clipboards held the latest cable traffic. Rolph was assigned the desk closest to the chief of station’s office. Across the room sat Guilsher, who was running the Tolkachev operation. Guilsher always looked dignified and often wore a blazer and tie to work. “Guilsher always looked like a president,” recalled one of his colleagues. By contrast, when they weren’t working their daytime cover jobs, Rolph and the younger case officers often showed up in jeans. Rolph’s first impression was that Guilsher was a bit stiff and formal, but any doubts were dispelled when he saw Guilsher at work. He was totally preoccupied with Tolkachev and often returned from their meetings with a detailed recollection of what Tolkachev had said, despite the distractions, tension, and exhaustion. When Guilsher spoke, Rolph listened intently. There was much to learn.

Rolph’s own journey to the Moscow station had begun as a young boy on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe. When he was ten years old, he had tagged along with his father, Arthur, a lieutenant colonel who commanded a battalion of the Sixth Armored Calvary responsible for border security in West Germany, where it met Czechoslovakia. Arthur took his son to see a frontier that bristled with hostility: watchtowers, dog patrols, killing zones, and machine gun nests. If a real war ever broke out in Europe, this was the place that would be overrun by invading Warsaw Pact tanks and troops. For Rolph, the border left a deep impression: the land beyond the fences looked mysterious, and he was intrigued and fearful. Later, when his family returned to the United States, Rolph studied Russian at the University of Kentucky and was planning to attend graduate school to study Russian history, but the Vietnam War loomed. By lottery number, he was facing the draft, so he enlisted. For his initial training, he selected language study in Russian. Later, he became an officer. More than once, he was shoulder to shoulder with men destined for Vietnam, but he did not go. The army sent him instead to West Berlin as an intelligence case officer.

He wore civilian clothes and worked from a small office in the Berlin Brigade, the garrison for occupation forces of the United States. His mission was to take lists of recent refugees who had come over from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and knock on their doors, seeking out tidbits of intelligence about the armies of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. It was hard work, often frustrating. “It was really collecting ash and trash,” he recalled later. “We were trying to scrape together low-level fragments of tactical information. And when we found someone, and they were willing, then of course the big question was, would you go back for us? Do you want to visit your aunt and uncle in Prague? Would you be willing to drive by the base and take some pictures?” Occasionally, they came across a good source but not for long. The promising cases were quickly transferred to the CIA. The CIA base was in a building close by the Berlin Brigade. “All the routine cases they would say to us, ‘Good job, keep it up!’ Then a good one would float to the surface, and they would take it.”

Even so, Rolph relished the intelligence work. He had a competitive instinct to crack open secrets in the “denied areas” of the East, those dark lands he saw beyond the wall. But he concluded that clandestine human intelligence gathering was a backwater in the army and would never make much of a career. He left the military after a few years and returned to the United States for graduate school at Indiana University to earn a doctorate in Russian history, hoping to become a professor. On closer inspection, this, too, seemed a dead end. The job market was thin. Out of pragmatic concerns for his family—a second child was on the way—he went to law school instead, thinking it would at least be lucrative. Rolph earned a law degree from Indiana University and began to practice law, but after a year as an attorney his heart wasn’t in it. He felt the pull of those boyhood memories. When he heard a CIA recruiter was coming to a nearby town, he drove there for an interview and filled out the application. Nothing happened for a year; then suddenly he was offered a job. He reported to the CIA for training in 1977.

It was a time of widespread doubt about America’s role in the world, but Rolph shared none of these doubts. He believed deeply in the battle against communism and the struggle to protect freedom, an outlook born not so much from ideology as from his own experience. He knew the Soviet Union in earlier decades maintained a vast system of penal colonies populated by tens of thousands of people who were incarcerated for their thoughts and nothing else. He knew well the ugly reality of the Berlin Wall, the dirty, plowed strip laden with watchtowers, mines, barbed wire, automatic weapons, electric-shock fences, feral dogs, and probing floodlights. The Cold War had to be fought, and Rolph wanted to be part of it.

During his initial training at the CIA, Rolph was asked if he had a preference for where to serve. The CIA was divided into geographic divisions. Many young trainees did not want to go to the Moscow station, because it was known as a difficult place to run spies. It was all “sticks and bricks,” some said disdainfully: laying down dead drops and impersonal communications, not handling agents eye to eye. But Rolph repeated to anyone who would listen: he wanted the Soviet division.

Sometimes, the CIA sent young case officers to the Moscow station who had never served abroad with the CIA; that way, the KGB would be less likely to spot them. But at the time, there was only one vacant slot in Moscow, working with a cover in the defense attaché’s office. The CIA hesitated. Two years earlier, the slot was held by a CIA case officer who was ambushed and expelled. If a new man walked in, the KGB might immediately assume he was an intelligence officer. Despite the misgivings, Rolph got the job. He took the basic CIA training course and then more training for espionage operations in “denied areas,” learning how to dodge the relentless surveillance of the KGB.

At the time, he learned the Moscow station was carrying out one of the most extraordinary technical operations yet attempted against the Soviet Union. High-resolution imagery from a spy satellite showed that workers were digging a trench and laying a communications line along a country road between the Krasnaya Pakhra Nuclear Weapons Research Institute, located at Troitsk, twenty-two miles southwest of Moscow, and the Defense Ministry in the capital. The CIA planned to put a silent wiretap on the line, an electronic collar that would scoop up the secrets and record them, without being detected. The wiretap would be placed in a manhole along a highway where the cable was buried. Rolph was assigned to the nascent project while still in training. An exact mock-up of the manhole had been built near Washington, D.C., by a CIA contractor for training. Step one was to pry off the heavy manhole lid. Rolph was instructed how to use a crowbar and hook to remove it. Once he was inside, a case officer’s patience and skill would be sorely tested. Trainees had exercised in blindfolds to see if they could enter the manhole and carry out the operation by feel alone.

Rolph was thrilled to be selected for the mission. In training one day, he hoisted the heavy manhole cover using the crowbar and hook. Then suddenly he dropped it. The manhole cover smashed down on his thumb. Rolph felt a jolt of pain. He turned to his supervisor and tried to seem unperturbed.

The supervisor took one glance at his thumb, which was limp, and sent him to the hospital. It was broken.

A few days later, wearing a cast, Rolph returned to headquarters. He volunteered to resume the training on the manhole as soon as the cast came off, in a few weeks. But his superiors waved him off, saying there wasn’t time; they didn’t want to delay his arrival in Moscow. Rolph felt angry at himself and sheepish about the accident, but he didn’t linger over it. He had been selected for Moscow duty and was proud to be going. He felt like an astronaut chosen for an Apollo mission. Soon, with his cast off and his training complete, he walked into the Moscow station.

Rolph arrived as the days of timidity in Moscow—the days when there hadn’t been an agent worth the name—were over. The station, once frozen by Turner’s stand-down order, was now buzzing with activity. Tolkachev was producing huge volumes of secret documents, and the manhole wiretap was about to be emplaced and connected. Then, just as Rolph found his desk in the station, yet another audacious operation got under way, and he would be part of it.
1

That summer, Victor Sheymov took advantage of the warm evenings to stroll with his wife, Olga, on the broad avenues of Moscow. Sheymov was thirty-three years old, one of the youngest majors in the KGB. He held an extremely sensitive job in the directorate responsible for the agency’s encrypted communications with its stations—each known as a
rezidentura—
around the world. Sheymov worked in “the Tower,” a building at KGB headquarters that housed the Eighth Chief Directorate, located behind the Lubyanka, a foreboding prerevolutionary stone structure that had come to symbolize the power of the KGB and its Soviet predecessors. Before coming to the KGB, Sheymov worked on missile guidance systems. His father was a military engineer and his mother a doctor. His reputation was that of a young electronics whiz: he had recently been dispatched to China to solve an eavesdropping case that no one else could crack, and he did. But privately, Sheymov was seething.
2

It was hard to say when the disenchantment set in. He had been promoted so rapidly that he had never acquired the blithe passivity of the older generation. He was young enough to be offended when things weren’t right. Early in his days at the KGB, he had been assigned to a secret unit that prepared briefings and analysis for the Politburo. The briefings were altered to meet specific orders and were full of deceptions and fabrications. Sheymov was appalled. He saw a chasm between the reports to the bosses and the reality on the streets. One day, he went to the KGB library and asked the woman at the desk if he could read a history of the Communist Party. He saw himself as a scientist, an engineer, someone who respected facts. Maybe he could find answers to his questions in such a book. Everyone who had a college education had to take a course on the history of the party; what could be more loyal than a curiosity about the history of the party? The librarian asked him for his identification card, perhaps intending to report him to superiors. He could see it on her face: Why would anybody be reading such a thing? Sheymov played it cool, pretended to be interested in another book, and walked out as soon as he could.

Then a friend in the KGB named Valentin died suddenly and mysteriously. Valentin had been youthful and healthy, a cross-country skier. His father was a member of the Central Committee. But Valentin was a nonconformist type, telling Sheymov that he despised his father and the party hierarchy. He had called them a “disgusting gang” in the presence of his father. After the death, Sheymov discovered that his friend was probably murdered by thugs from the KGB. At Valentin’s funeral, he stood over the casket and silently vowed to exact revenge.

In the months that followed, Sheymov pondered what to do. He was more and more disillusioned. It was fashionable among younger people at the time to be cynical about the system, to affect Western dress and culture, and to make wicked jokes about Brezhnev and the aging, dysfunctional party leadership. But most people just talked in private; they did not act on their thoughts. In 1979, Sheymov decided to act. He started to plan for an escape. He was determined to strike a blow at the system, a damaging blow. Olga was frightened—their daughter, Yelena, had just turned four years old—but she vowed to stick by him.

At first, Sheymov hatched a plan to contact an American intelligence officer. Sheymov had never been to the United States and harbored no illusions. He knew from reading secret cables that the United States was the enemy, and his logic was simple: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He wanted to take his revenge by going to America.

He knew it would be risky. He possessed a top secret security clearance. If discovered, he would be immediately arrested and probably executed. Yet Sheymov was streetwise about Moscow, an intelligence officer trained to move about without being detected. He devoted hours to searching for a car with the license plates of an American diplomat. But Sheymov could not find a car with D-04 plates. He then decided to write a note, in case he encountered an American intelligence officer. “Hello,” it began, “I am a KGB officer with access to highly sensitive information.” He hinted that his dissatisfaction with the system demanded “action” and proposed a meeting at a tobacco kiosk near a Moscow Metro station. But Sheymov could not find anyone to give the note to. One night, he confessed to Olga that four of his ideas for contacting the Americans had all come to nothing. He had even concocted a reason to visit the Foreign Ministry for a meeting, thinking he might find the car of an American diplomat there. He planned to bump into the American car with his own, creating a small fender-bender incident at which he could leap out and give the driver his note. At one point, Sheymov spotted an American car, but when he tried to scrape it, the driver pulled away just in time. The note was in Sheymov’s palm that day but never delivered.