The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (22 page)

Sofia went to visit her father in 1937, and that was the beginning of the end. He was a capitalist and a foreigner, more than enough to generate suspicion. On September 17, the secret police came to apartment 35. They arrested Sofia, then thirty-four years old. The charge was that she belonged to a subversive Trotskyist organization in the timber industry.
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When she was taken away and the door closed, she left behind a daughter, her only child, who was two years old.

Six days later, the secret police came for Ivan. He had refused to denounce Sofia. He was not at home; they found him at the apartment of a friend. He was taken to Moscow’s notorious Butyrskaya Prison and charged with participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization.
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Sofia and Ivan never saw each other again. Her visit to her father in Denmark had prompted someone to denounce her. It is not known who, or what was said, but considering that her father was in private business and lived overseas, that was probably sufficient. Her trial was held on December 10, 1937, and she was convicted of subversion. She was executed immediately. The shootings usually took place at night.

In a frenzy of terror, vast numbers of people were sentenced each day, sometimes several hundred, and shot. According to Conquest, two days after Sofia was executed, on December 12, 1937, Stalin and his premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved 3,167 death sentences—and then went to watch a movie. Not all the executions were approved at such a high level; on a day in October, the secret police chief, Nikolai Yezhov, and another official considered 551 names and sentenced every one of them to be shot.
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Ivan had been arrested for “participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization” and convicted for “sabotage” and refusing to inform on others. He steadfastly refused to turn in anyone or to plead guilty. In March 1939, he was sentenced to ten years in the prison camps. He was a son of peasants and was sent to a labor camp in the coalfields of Vorkuta, twelve hundred miles from Moscow and a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. He was held incommunicado—no letters allowed.

Their toddler daughter was sent to a state orphanage. So many people had been declared “enemies of the people” in those years that the orphanages were overflowing.
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The daughter was fortunate in one respect: her parents had retained a nanny, whose name was Dunya. Out of compassion and perhaps fear, Dunya moved with the little girl from institution to institution as she grew up in the years after the arrests and the execution of her mother.
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In 1947, Ivan was released from the prison camp, having served ten years. But he did not return to Moscow right away. Still fearing arrest, he moved from city to city. Only after Stalin died in 1953 did he feel it was safe to come home and was reunited with his daughter, then eighteen years old. They were together only a few years. On March 23, 1955, Ivan Kuzmin was rehabilitated for “failure to prove a charge.” But he did not live long after that. On December 10, 1956, he died of a brain disease in Moscow.
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The daughter of Sofia and Ivan, who suffered a childhood without parents because of Stalin’s purges, married Adolf Tolkachev the year after her father died. Natalia Ivanovna Kuzmina was brimming with strong emotions. She managed to stay out of trouble, but those who worked with her knew of her feelings. She read the banned writer Boris Pasternak and the poet Osip Mandelstam. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
was published in 1962 in
Novy Mir
, a literary journal, she was the first in the family to devour it. Later, when possession of Solzhenitsyn’s unpublished works was more dangerous, she was unafraid to pass around copies in samizdat. In 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, there was a rush in Soviet workplaces to pass resolutions supporting the action. She was the only person in her group to vote no. She was, in the words of a supervisor, “unable to be insincere.”
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Her long ordeal and her deep antipathy to the Soviet party-state became Tolkachev’s, too.

Adik was fourteen years old the night that German bombers attacked Moscow, July 21, 1941. The city in those years was a tinderbox, largely constructed out of wood, and the German planes dropped 104 tons of high explosive and forty-six thousand incendiary bombs, killing 130 persons, the first in a wave of aerial bombings that would go on until the following April. The Soviet capital was defended by over six hundred large searchlights and eight hundred anti-aircraft guns but only primitive radars.
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The bombings showed how the Soviet Union desperately needed improved radar, and the emerging technology of radar became the central focus of young Tolkachev’s career.

Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev was born on January 6, 1927, in what was then the Soviet Socialist Kazakh Republic, now Kazakhstan. His family moved to Moscow when he was two years old. Little is known about his parents or his brother, who had only a tenth-grade education and worked as an electrical mechanic on the railroads. Adik went to a vocational school, the equivalent of a high school, where he studied electronics, finishing in 1948. He then went to the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute in the Ukraine, completing his studies in 1954 in the radio-technical department, chiefly about radar. In those days, students had no choice where they would work. Under an assignment system in the centrally planned economy known as
raspredelenie
, they were directed to jobs.
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Tolkachev was assigned to a military research facility, the Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering, known by its Russian acronym, NIIR. It was later given an additional name, Phazotron Scientific Design Association, or simply Phazotron. The institute was made up of two dozen structures crowded into a ten-acre compound near the Belarussky train station in Moscow, about two miles from the Kremlin. Along the eastern side of the compound, on a narrow lane, Electrichesky Pereulok, stood a long row of aging brick buildings, the exteriors decorated with baroque flourishes from the Russian architecture of the late 1880s. It was in these buildings that the institute had been founded in 1917 to fabricate instruments for aviation, including a simple but reliable device to measure wind speed. After that, the enterprise, known as Avia-Pribor, made watches, thermal instruments, and gramophones—and then radar.
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While the bombs were still being dropped by German airplanes in January 1942, the buildings at Electrichesky Pereulok were given a new name, Factory No. 339, and became the first manufacturing facility for radar in the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the facility expanded into research and development of military radars, which grew in sophistication from simple sighting devices to complex aviation and weapons guidance systems.

It was the only place Tolkachev had ever worked. Phazotron’s radars for Soviet warplanes were named
oryol
,
smerch
, and
sapfir
.
As in many other areas of technology, the Soviet Union struggled to catch up to the West. In the early 1970s, Soviet airborne radars could not spot moving objects close to the ground, meaning they could fail to detect a terrain-hugging bomber or cruise missile. This vulnerability became a major design challenge for Phazotron; the engineers were pressed to build radars that could “look down” from above and identify low-flying objects moving against the background of the earth. The United States was planning to use low-flying, penetrating bombers to attack the Soviet Union in the event of any war.
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At first, Phazotron produced an airborne radar known as the RP-23, or Sapfir-23, which provided limited look-down capability for MiG fighters. Then the institute was ordered to develop a more sophisticated model to be deployed on the MiG-31, a planned supersonic interceptor. But the task proved too difficult for Tolkachev’s institute to complete. By one account, the institute made lavish claims for a new radar that it simply could not bring to fruition. Despite a wealth of experience, Phazotron was unable to solve the problem of tracking and destroying a low-flying object against the ground clutter of earth, nor had it been able to track multiple targets at once. Phazotron was forced in 1971 to transfer the plans to a competing institute, the Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Engineering, or NIIP. After years of work, the competing institute and several others solved most of the problems in a new radar, called
zaslon
. Weighing a half ton, it was twice as heavy as the largest airborne U.S. radar, but it worked—and carried the first-ever Soviet airborne computer. The
zaslon
was flight-tested for the first time in 1976 and by 1978 had been shown to track ten targets at once. The first MiG-31 aircraft carrying the
zaslon
radar were entering service in the Soviet air defense forces in the autumn of 1981.
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By that time, Tolkachev had already delivered to the CIA hundreds of pages of blueprints and design specifications of Sapfir-23 and five circuit boards. He gave them plans and drawings of the
zaslon
, too.

The painful history of the Kuzmin family was passed down to Natasha—and to Adik—in her father’s last years. Ivan told his daughter the unvarnished truth: the terror of the arrests, the finality of the verdicts, the sudden destruction of their family. She learned that Ivan was punished because he stoutly refused to denounce his wife, Sofia.

In 1957, the year after Ivan’s death, when Adik and Natasha married, the threat of Stalin’s mass repressions had passed, but strong memories lingered, and the full scope was only beginning to reveal itself. Khrushchev devoted a speech to Stalin’s excesses at the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956, blaming Stalin for the unwarranted arrest and execution of party officials during the purges, for the surprise attack on the Soviet Union by Hitler, and for other blunders, although not for the true scope of the repressions or the forced collectivization and famine, calamities for which Khrushchev shared responsibility. Nonetheless, Khrushchev had opened the door; he denounced the “cult of personality” that had allowed Stalin to amass such raw power. The speech heralded a period of liberalization known as the thaw, after the title of Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel. Breaking with years of forced adherence to the dictates of socialist realism, some freethinking writers and artists dared push the boundaries of what was permissible, and hopes ran high that a different country might emerge from the Great Terror and the ravages of war. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 fueled the optimism, especially among young people. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a historian and human rights champion, recalled that in the years that followed Khrushchev’s speech, “Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, knowledge, beliefs, questions. Every night, we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read ‘unofficial’ prose, and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country. That was the time of our awakening.” The awakening undoubtedly swayed Adik and Natasha, too.
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Tolkachev told the CIA that “in my youth” politics had played “a significant role” but he had lost interest and then become scornful of what he called the “impassable, hypocritical demagoguery” of the Soviet party-state. He did not elaborate on this change, but by the mid-1960s, as the thaw was ending and with Khrushchev deposed, Tolkachev seems to have been thinking about how to express his unhappiness.

In May 1965, his son, Oleg, was born. Tolkachev said he did not act at the time because he did not want to endanger his family. “I waited for my son to grow up,” he wrote to the CIA of his decision to remain quiet, saying he realized that “in case of a flap my family would face a severe ordeal.”

Then, in the years that followed, the mid-1970s, Tolkachev found inspiration in Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, voices of conscience who each waged a titanic struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. Sakharov, like Tolkachev, had a top secret security clearance, yet he possessed the courage to dissent. Tolkachev did not know him personally but knew what Sakharov stood for.

In the early months of 1968, Andrei Sakharov had worked alone, late into the evening at his gabled, two-story house nestled in the trees at Arzamas-16, the nuclear weapons laboratory, located in the city of Sarov, 230 miles east of Moscow. Sakharov was the principal designer of the Soviet thermonuclear bomb. A pillar of the scientific establishment who entered the Academy of Sciences in his thirties, he had profound doubts about the moral and ecological consequences of his work, and he played a role in persuading Khrushchev to sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the United States in 1963. Now his conscience was calling him again and would take him well beyond the closed world of Arzamas-16, where he had thrived and been recognized as a brilliant physicist.

Each night, from 7:00 until midnight, alone in the house in the woods, Sakharov worked on an essay about the future of mankind. It became his first significant act of dissent against the Soviet system. Finished in April, the essay was titled “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov’s mind ranged far and wide, warning that the planet was threatened by thermonuclear war, hunger, ecological catastrophe, and despotism, but he also offered idealistic and utopian ideas to save the world, suggesting that socialism and capitalism could live together—he called it “convergence”—and the superpowers should not be trying to destroy each other. He wrote candidly of Stalin’s crimes. He insisted on a complete de-Stalinization of the country, the end of censorship, release of political prisoners, freedom of opinion, and democratization. The document was startling, visionary, and potentially explosive. Sakharov rewrote and polished his essay and at one point showed it to Yuli Khariton, the scientific director of the laboratory and a founder of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. The two of them were alone on Khariton’s private train. “Well, what did you think?” Sakharov asked Khariton. “It’s awful,” Khariton replied. “The style?” Sakharov asked. Khariton grimaced. “No, not the style, it’s the content that’s awful!” But Sakharov had already begun circulating the essay in carbon copies, told Khariton he believed everything he had written, and could not withdraw it. In July, the manifesto was published abroad, first in a Dutch newspaper and then in the
New York Times
on July 22. The essay also circulated widely in samizdat, hand-to-hand copies, inside the Soviet Union. Sakharov was then suspended—effectively fired—from his job at the nuclear weapons laboratory.
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