The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (21 page)

When headquarters developed the fifty-five rolls of film Tolkachev had given Rolph in the park, six were blank. It might have been a glitch; Rolph didn’t want to bother Tolkachev about it but made a mental note to bring him a new Pentax camera body at the next meeting.
21
On the remainder of the film, the CIA found sparkling new gems from inside Soviet vaults. Seven rolls of film documented a top secret surface-to-air missile code-named
shtora
, or “blind,” as in a window shade—designed to be “not detectable by target aircraft” because of its “advanced and complex jam-proofing and secure operating procedures.” Other rolls covered topics in computer logic for radar systems and provided the CIA with a set of logs of secret technical reports as they arrived at Tolkachev’s institute in 1978, 1979, and 1980, which would allow the Americans to accurately judge the state of Soviet military high technology.
22

The billion dollar spy had come through again.

CIA headquarters dispatched to the Moscow station a pair of German-made stereo headphones, catalogs for stereo systems, and albums by Alice Cooper, Nazareth, and Uriah Heep.

H
is family and friends called him Adik. His eyes were the color of ash, under a broad forehead and thick brown hair, with a crook in the bridge of his nose from a boyhood hockey accident. He stood about five feet six inches tall. Tolkachev seemed a quiet fellow to those who knew him. He liked tinkering with electronics and enjoyed building things with his hands, holding a soldering iron or wood plane, fixing a radio, or hammering together a cold frame. Tolkachev was so reserved that he never told his son what he did at work or took the boy to his office.

But inwardly, his mind was not at ease. He was haunted by a dark chapter of Soviet history, and he wanted revenge.
1

Tolkachev was fifty-four years old in 1981. He suffered from high blood pressure and tried to pay attention to his health, jogging in the spring, summer, and fall and skiing in the winter. He drank alcohol only rarely. He was usually up before dawn, especially in the long winter, according to letters he wrote to the CIA. Every other day during the week, he got out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and went for a run outdoors, if it wasn’t raining or biting cold. He usually took the main elevator down to the ground floor and pushed open the heavy door onto the tree-lined square, Ploshchad Vosstaniya, or Square of the Uprising, commemorating the revolts against the Russian tsar and later the Bolshevik Revolution. Day after day, he ran the same route: first across the square toward the broad boulevard known as the Garden Ring Road, then a right turn toward the U.S. embassy, past the guard shacks that stood in front of the embassy, then another right turn, down a small lane and the spot where, three years earlier, he had handed a letter to Hathaway, in the shadow of a small Russian Orthodox church.
2
Tolkachev knew these streets well; he had walked and run them tirelessly in earlier years, searching for cars with license plates indicating they belonged to American diplomats, hoping to drop a note through an open window.

In a letter to the CIA, Tolkachev described himself as a morning person. “You probably know,” he wrote, “that people are sometimes divided into two different types of personalities: ‘skylarks’ and ‘owls.’ The first have no trouble getting up in the morning but start getting sleepy as evening approaches. The latter are just the opposite. I belong to the ‘skylarks,’ my wife and son to the ‘owls.’ ”

After his jog, Tolkachev said, he usually woke his wife and son and made them breakfast. Natasha, who worked in the antenna department of the institute, was a heavyset woman, and she often left for work before Tolkachev, in order to catch the bus. Tolkachev liked to walk to work, through the backstreets.

Their son was growing fast and stood five inches taller than his father. Oleg had not been a rebellious teenager, but his interests ran more toward his mother’s side—arts, culture, music, and design—than toward his father’s penchant for electronics and engineering. Oleg attended a special school that emphasized English instruction. He was already reading Kipling and Asimov and was consumed with Western rock music. Adik liked his son’s music, even if he had only a very weak understanding of English. He was personally fond of jazz, which had been somewhat subversive in Soviet times.

Adik tried to bridge the age gap with his teenage son. They went skiing together in the winter, and in the summer months the family often roughed it on camping trips around the Soviet Union. Once they went to the Baltic Sea, and another year to Lake Valdai. Because he held a security clearance, Tolkachev could not get permission to travel abroad. “I always go with my wife and son,” Tolkachev wrote to the CIA of his vacations. “We usually rest in wooded areas on rivers or lakes in a primitive manner, i.e., in camping tent, we cook on a campfire, etc. This year we also plan to go camping with a tent and backpacks.” He added, “I consider that I have the normal attachment to the family that exists in mankind.”

Tolkachev’s imposing apartment building featured a twenty-two-story central tower with a spire, flanked by two eighteen-floor wings. Those who lived there included Mikhail Gromov, who set a world record flying over the North Pole; Georgi Lobov, a decorated World War II and Korean War fighter ace; and Sergei Anokhin, renowned for his pioneering aviation feats, such as putting a MiG-15 into a supersonic dive. Valentin Glushko, the principal designer of Soviet rocket engines, also lived there, as did Vasily Mishin, who led the Soviet effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to build a lunar rocket. They were the Soviet aviation and missile elite.
3
But Tolkachev was a loner. He had once socialized with workers at his laboratory, he told the CIA, but now, “possibly because of age, all these friendly conversations started to tire me and I have practically ceased such activities.” He wrote, “During the past 10–15 years the number of my personal friends has sharply decreased. They are not out of commission … but my contacts with them have become very rare and accidental.”

Tolkachev’s apartment was quite comfortable, with two rooms, a small kitchen, a bath, and a toilet. Above the kitchen door was the crawl space, or
entresol
, which ran thirteen feet long and about three feet high. In this space, he stored his camping tent, sleeping bags, and building materials, as well as his spy equipment from the CIA. His wife, slightly shorter than Adik, was not agile or tall enough to reach it, and his son had no reason to. Tolkachev kept his tools in the
entresol
: a gauge for checking current, a soldering iron, and wire. For wood projects, he had stowed away his drill, plane, and saw. There were three other storage areas in the apartment, all of which he had built.

Adik was thirty years old when he married, late for a young Russian man of his generation. His wife was then twenty-two years old. Tolkachev wrote to the CIA, “I apparently belong to those who love once.”
4

Adik and Natasha lived and worked in the closed cocoon of the military-industrial complex, a sprawling archipelago of ministries, institutes, factories, and testing ranges. Tolkachev had the highest-level access to state secrets. Their way of thinking and their public behavior were governed by survival in the Soviet party-state system, which dictated conformity. By day, they played by the rules. By night, their private feelings were vastly different. Their thinking was forged in a profound moment of sorrow and loss in Natasha’s childhood, during Stalin’s purges of 1937, a loss that propelled Adik into the world of espionage.

Natasha’s father, Ivan Kuzmin, was editor in chief of the newspaper
Lyogkaya Industriya
, or light industry. He put a splash of happiness on page 1 of the paper for New Year’s Day 1937, a photograph that might have come from any family, including his own: an outsized image of a beaming mother, arms hoisting high a toddler with an enormous smile and grasping a doll in one hand. A festive New Year’s tree stood behind them.

The photograph radiates confidence in the future, but it is a posed and artificial buoyancy. The child’s arm is outstretched, beckoning like Lenin. It is accompanied by flowery commentary which declared that the Soviet Union was being “directed by the life-giving force of socialism, the Bolshevik Party, and Stalin’s genius.”
5
The newspaper was the daily chronicle of the textile industry, crammed with material from factory workers, directors, and occasionally Communist Party officials. Much of it was simply letters from worker-correspondents, each known as a
rabkor
, who wrote short bits and pieces about mills and factories, ideas for improved efficiency, and the use of technology and equipment. The front page often featured a large photograph of a young weaver and her success story—how she started her career at a mill, gained experience and skills, and one day suggested and introduced a method that enormously boosted efficiency. The paper printed a mixture of genuine commentary by workers and party exhortations at a time when the Soviet centrally planned economy was in a breakneck phase of industrialization. A headline declared, “It is important to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the implementation of the plan!” When a high-ranking party official or minister gave a speech, the paper often published the transcript on page 1. Page 2 carried daily tables of production—how much cotton, flax, hemp, jute, wool, silk, leather, and other materials were produced where. The third page was almost fully devoted to the ideas and suggestions of workers about how to increase production, and the newspaper was expanding its horizons to cover all aspects of light industry.

Kuzmin, then thirty-six years old, never signed articles. He appears to have been more like a moderator among competing voices, selecting the
rabkor
reports and perhaps writing the unsigned front-page editorials. A member of the Communist Party, he had been editor for four years. The paper, created in 1932 in a merger of other publications for textile workers, carried reports and correspondence from all kinds of people: weavers, engineers, and factory directors. But it was still a mouthpiece of the party-state.

In January 1937, readers could not miss the darkening clouds. The newspaper’s front page carried exhaustive coverage of the second of three Moscow show trials. Stalin was brutally snuffing out his rivals one by one, a harbinger of the coming Great Terror. In the first trial, in August 1936, sixteen defendants, including the Bolshevik revolutionaries Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, were accused of disloyalty and conspiring with Stalin’s exiled rival, Leon Trotsky. All of the defendants were sentenced to death and shot. The second trial focused on seventeen defendants who were considered lesser leaders of the plot. Thirteen of them were later executed and the rest sent to labor camps. Kuzmin’s newspaper published all the materials of the second trial, including full transcripts of the interrogations and reactions from readers. “Destroy the villains!” one reader wrote. “Shoot the fascist hirelings, despicable traitors! This is the unanimous demand of the working people of the USSR!” declared another. When the defendants were convicted on January 30, the newspaper published the text of the verdict. On February 1, the newspaper declared that Soviet workers “greeted the verdict of the Trotsky gang with deep satisfaction.”
6

The truth was far different. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” wrote the historian Robert Conquest.
7
“The terror of 1936–8 was an almost uniquely devastating blow inflicted by a government on its own population, and the charges against the millions of victims were almost without exception entirely false. Stalin personally ordered, inspired and organized the operation.”
8

On May 1, 1937, the Politburo members who were standing next to Stalin on the reviewing stand for traditional May Day celebrations in Red Square seemed to be unusually nervous, moving uneasily from one foot to the next. The reason for their anxiety: one of them was suddenly missing. Yan Rudzutak, a former full member of the Politburo, had disappeared, arrested at a supper party after a theater performance. The secret police detained everyone at the party, too. Three months later, four of the women were still in prison in their bedraggled evening dresses. After Rudzutak’s arrest, the next echelon of Moscow’s administrative and party elite began to vanish. “An atmosphere of fear hung over the Party and Government offices,” Conquest wrote. People disappeared on their way to their jobs in the morning. “Every day, another Central Committee member or Vice Chairman of a People’s Commissariat or one of their more important underlings was disappearing.”
9

After slicing through the party elite, the purges expanded later in the summer and into the autumn of 1937, wave after wave of suspicion, denunciation, arrest, and execution. One of the largest was the “kulak” operation, referring to the more prosperous farmers who had been forced off their land during Stalin’s disastrous forced collectivization of agriculture, more than 1.8 million of them sent to prison camps. Now nearing the end of the standard eight-year term, the kulaks were soon to return; Stalin feared a wave of disgruntled and embittered people coming home. The hammer fell with a secret police order, No. 00447, in July 1937, which set the pattern for the mass killings of the following two years. The document ordered arrests by quota—thousands and thousands at a time—in specific categories, such as “
kulaks
, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements.” The categories were so broad as to apply to almost anyone. People were arrested and executed for the slightest indiscretion, so they became extremely guarded in what they said in public; a single stray comment could be reported and lead to arrest, the charges entirely arbitrary. Tens of thousands of people were swept up suddenly, for no reason, from all walks of life.
10
The NKVD, forerunner to the KGB, divided all suspected “enemies” of the state into two categories: those who were shot, and those who were sent away to the camps for ten years. This was the biggest of the mass campaigns and accounted for half of all arrests and more than half of all executions—376,202 persons killed—in the two-year period.
11
The administrative class was sacked, arrested, and executed. In 1937, government ministers—known as commissars—for foreign trade, internal trade, heavy industry, education, justice, sea and river transport, and light industry were all removed and arrested.
12
There was so much paranoia that anyone who visited or knew someone who lived abroad could be suspect as an enemy of the people. Denunciations were often made recklessly and maliciously and could quickly lead to death. “Today, a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head,” said the writer Isaac Babel, who himself was arrested in the spring of 1939, charged with anti-Soviet activity and espionage, and shot in 1940.
13

In 1937, Ivan Kuzmin, the newspaper editor, and his wife, Sofia Efimovna Bamdas, lived at 14 Staropimenovsky Pereulok, a small lane in the heart of Moscow. Their apartment was located half an hour’s walk from the Kremlin. Sofia was also a Communist Party member and worked as head of the planning department in the Ministry of the Timber Industry. She was born in 1903 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Kremenchug, a town on the Dnieper River, in the Ukraine, once part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement.
14
The town was known for timber and grain exports. Her father, Efim, had fled to Europe and was prospering as a businessman in Denmark. Efim had two daughters, Sofia and Esfir, both of whom lived in Moscow.