The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (36 page)

7.
Ibid.

8.
Moscow station to headquarters, June 24, 1980, 241232Z.

9.
Memo to the Director of Central Intelligence from chief, Soviet division, July 23, 1980.

10.
Headquarters to Moscow station, July 11, 1980, 110003Z.

1.
David Rolph, interview with author, Feb. 3 and May 19, 2013.

2.
Victor Sheymov,
Tower of Secrets: A Real Life Spy Thriller
(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993). In his memoir, Sheymov does not distinguish between different CIA case officers he met, and he describes one part of a meeting as a dream. This chapter is based in part on his memoir and on separate information from confidential sources.

1.
Wallace and Melton,
Spycraft
, 108.

2.
David Rolph, interview with author, May 6, 2012, and May 19, 2013. This chapter also includes material from interviews with confidential sources.

3.
Moscow station to headquarters, Sept. 9, 1980, 091200Z, which includes Rolph’s draft ops note.

4.
Moscow station to headquarters, Sept. 17, 1980, 171047Z.

5.
Headquarters to Moscow station, Sept. 29, 1980, 292348Z.

6.
Moscow station to headquarters, Oct. 16, 1980, 161309Z.

1.
David Rolph, interview with author, May 6, 2012.

2.
On the L-pill, two confidential sources familiar with the device.

3.
Vasily Aksyonov’s 1981 novel,
The
Island of Crimea
(New York: Random House, 1983), depicts a fictional island that a journalist visits to see a prosperous Russian market democracy and is asked to bring back scarce goods to the communist Soviet Union. These are a sampling of items from the list, 113.

4.
Moscow station to headquarters, Oct. 18, 1980, 180826Z.

5.
Moscow station to headquarters, Nov. 21, 1980, 211118Z, and Nov. 28, 1980, 281231Z.

6.
Moscow station to headquarters, Dec. 10, 1980, 101150Z. Tolkachev paid close attention to compensation. He wrote a long section in his ops note with mathematical formulas to calculate the interest and ruble exchange rate. He accepted the CIA offer, $300,000 a year, plus interest he put at the ruble equivalent of $43,000 a year. At the end of the note, he acknowledged the CIA might be justified in asking, if exfiltration plans were under way and “all the money I have received earlier has not been spent,” why did he want so much more cash? “It happens that our exit is not being organized for today or tomorrow,” he wrote. “During this time, anything can happen which can delay my exit or make it impossible altogether, for example I can have a car accident or become seriously ill and after that lose my ability to work.” He wanted the money, he said, just in case something “unforeseen” would make it “impossible for me to get out of the USSR.”

7.
Moscow station to headquarters, Dec. 9, 1980, 090811Z and 091505Z; draft of ops note to Tolkachev, undated; Rolph interviews May 2, 2012, and Feb. 10, 2013.

8.
William J. Casey, “Progress at the CIA,” memo, May 6, 1981. WHORM Subject Files: FG006-02, doc. No. 019195s, May 6, 1981, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

9.
Bob Woodward,
Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86, 305.

10.
Moscow station to headquarters, March 11, 1981, 110940Z.

11.
Moscow station to headquarters, March 11, 1981, 111439Z.

12.
Gerber wrote in a cable to headquarters on August 13, 1980, 131400Z, that “we do not think pace of operation and nature of product lend themselves” to electronic communications. “We have not suffered notably from lack of electronic commo in the past and see no real requirement for capability in the future.” He added, “Requirements in
cksphere
case have historically not been brief, specific, and urgent. Nor, based on our understanding of
cksphere
’s access, can we expect him to supply intelligence suitable for passage” with Discus. Gerber added that even with careful tradecraft, “some risk remains whenever agent is brought into proximity of case officer under surveillance. Slight error by station officer in casing, testing, or servicing or by agent in demeanor or servicing can be disastrous. With
cksphere
, we have no opportunity for training or practice.”

13.
Weiser,
Secret Life
, 230–32. Also Hathaway, interview with author, Aug. 28, 2013.

14.
Bob Wallace (former head of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service), interview with author, Oct. 7, 2013.

15.
Moscow station to headquarters, March 11, 1981, 111439Z. In this cable, Rolph said, “Although CKS did not mention his original production plan, we cannot help but recall that he may be reaching the limits of what he can reasonably and easily get his hands on in the way of desirable material.”

16.
Moscow station to headquarters, March 11, 1981, 111439Z.

17.
Moscow station to headquarters, April 2, 1981, 020732Z.

18.
Moscow station to headquarters, June 23, 1981, 231244Z.

19.
Headquarters to Moscow station, June 26, 1981, 260019Z.

20.
Moscow station to headquarters, June 26, 1981, 261440Z. Separately, two confidential sources said the device antenna was too small and Moscow was at the very outer limit of the Marisat satellite’s workable footprint. Also see Moscow station to headquarters, July 2, 1981, 021348Z. About two years later, the device was returned to the Moscow station for testing. On Monday, March 7, 1983, the deputy chief of station, Richard Osborne, took it to an open field in Moscow known as Poklonnaya Gora. Osborne set up the device. He was arrested on the spot by the KGB. The Soviet news agency Tass reported that Osborne, identified as a first secretary at the U.S. embassy, “was detained red-handed in Moscow on March 7, this year, while working with espionage radio apparatus. Confiscated from him was a set of portable intelligence special-purpose apparatus for the transmission of espionage information via the U.S. ‘Marisat’ communications satellites, and his own notes which were written in a pad made of paper quickly soluble in water, and which expose Osborne’s espionage activities.” Osborne was declared persona non grata and expelled from the Soviet Union. See John F. Burns, “Moscow Ousts a U.S. Diplomat, Calling Him a Spy,”
New York Times
, March 11, 1983, 11.

21.
Moscow station to headquarters, April 11, 1981, 110812Z.

22.
Headquarters to Moscow station, Nov. 25, 1981, 251829Z. Some of these topics were also included in earlier rolls of film.

1.
Except where otherwise noted, details of Tolkachev’s family and work in this chapter are drawn from his letters and comments to the CIA, primarily three cables: Moscow station to headquarters, March 2, 1978, 021500Z, in which the station reports on Tolkachev’s note revealing his identity; Moscow station to headquarters, April 26, 1979, 261013Z, transmitting Tolkachev’s answers to questions from headquarters; and Moscow station to headquarters, Dec. 10, 1980, 101150Z, providing answers to questions concerning a possible exfiltration. The author also interviewed a confidential source close to the family.

2.
It was the Church of the Nine Martyrs of Kizik, founded by a patriarch who had opposed Peter the Great’s reforms of the seventeenth century.

3.
The aviation and rocket elite who lived there are honored by stone tablets at the base of the tower.

4.
Most Russian men his age were married by about age twenty-five. See Sergei Scherbov and Harrie van Vianen, “Marriage in Russia: A Reconstruction,”
Demographic Research
10, article 2 (2004): 27–60,
www.demographic-research.org
.

5.
Lyogkaya Industriya
, Jan. 1, 1937, 1, Russian State Archive of the Economy, Moscow.

6.
Lyogkaya Industriya
, Jan. 19–Feb. 1, 1937, Russian State Archive of the Economy.

7.
Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 252.

8.
Robert Conquest,
Stalin: Breaker of Nations
(New York: Viking, 1991), 206.

9.
Conquest,
Great Terror
, 239. According to Orlando Figes, of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 102 were arrested and shot, and 5 more killed themselves in 1937–38; in addition, 56 percent of the congress delegates were imprisoned in those years. Of the 767 members of the Red Army high command, 412 were executed, 29 died in prison, 3 committed suicide, and 59 remained in jail. See Figes,
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
(New York: Metropolitan, 2007), 238–39.

10.
An examination of a mass grave outside Moscow showed that blue-collar and white-collar workers were prominent among those who suffered. Together with the peasants, they were about two-thirds of the victims. See Karl Schlögel,
Moscow, 1937
(Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2012), 490.

11.
Figes,
Whisperers
, 240; Schlögel,
Moscow, 1937
, 492–93.

12.
Conquest,
Great Terror
, 240.

13.
Ibid., 256–57.

14.
The Pale of Settlement was a section of imperial Russia, in the west, to which permanent residency by Jews was confined. The Jews were often poor and concentrated in areas that made them targets for attacks, or pogroms.

15.
Bamdas, S. E., fond 1, opis 1, delo 282, 1–2, Archives of Memorial International, Moscow.

16.
Kuzmin, I. A., fond 1, opis 1, delo 2543, 1–2, Archives of Memorial International.

17.
Conquest,
Great Terror
, 235.

18.
Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky,
Children of the Gulag
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 167.

19.
Confidential source close to the family. It is not known why Sofia’s sister did not take in her daughter, but relatives were often fearful of accepting children of “enemies of the people.” Sofia’s sister, Esfir Bamdas, was married to Konstantin Starostin, a Moscow party leader, who was arrested in December 1937 for “anti-Soviet activity” and sentenced to ten years in prison. He died in 1939. Esfir, also a party member, was arrested in 1951 as a result of a denunciation and sentenced to five years but was released in 1953 under an amnesty.

20.
Kuzmin, I. A., fond 1, opis 1, delo 2543, 1–2, Archives of Memorial International, Moscow.

21.
Vladimir Libin, “Detained with Evidence,”
New York Novoye Russkoye Slovo
, June 27, 1997. Libin was a close family friend. A confidential source close to the family recalled Natasha reading Pasternak and Mandelstam.

22.
Rodric Braithwaite,
Moscow, 1941: A City and Its People at War
(London: Profile Books, 2006), 184–207. Soviet engineers and scientists had been studying the new radar technology since the 1930s but lagged behind Britain and the United States, hampered by rivalries, indifference in the armed forces, and Stalin’s purges. One of the country’s most knowledgeable radar scientists, Pavel Oshchepkov, was arrested in 1937 and spent the next ten years in prison. John Erikson, “Radio-location and the Air Defence Problem: The Design and Development of Soviet Radar, 1934–40,”
Social Studies of Science
2 (1972): 241–68.

Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II
for details on Factory No. 339.

23.
Tolkachev was born in Aktyubinsk, a railroad town, the scene of a major battle in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks captured the town from the White Army in 1919. Local archives show that in September 1919 a man named Tolkachev was chosen to be secretary of the local Bolshevik organizing bureau in Aktyubinsk. He was probably Tolkachev’s father, Georgi. About a decade later, by 1928, Soviet authorities were attempting to turn the local government over to Kazakhs, and the Tolkachev family departed for Moscow. See “History of Aktyubinsk Oblast: A Historical Chronicle of the Region in Documents, Research, and Photographs,” http://myaktobe.kz.

24.
“Phazotron: From 20th to 21st Century,” Phazotron-NIIR Corp., 2003. The author is grateful to Rustam Rahmatullin, a historian of Russian architecture, for context on the buildings and the history.

25.
In the early Cold War, the nuclear threat came from high-flying bombers. The United States planned a new, manned penetrating bomber, the XB-70 Valkyrie, that would reach altitudes of 77,000 feet and three times the speed of sound. See National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, “North American XB-70 Valkyrie,” fact sheet,
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=592
. Also, starting in 1956, the CIA’s U-2 spy plane was overflying the Soviet Union at altitudes of 68,000 feet and higher. In response to these high-altitude threats, Soviet aircraft designers began work on what became the MiG-25 interceptor. The radar was designed at Phazotron. The Soviet Union also built improved surface-to-air missiles that could shoot down aircraft at high altitudes. On May 1, 1960, a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near the U-2 being piloted by Francis Gary Powers at 70,500 feet above Sverdlovsk, downing Powers and bringing the CIA’s overflights of the Soviet Union to an end. Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, “The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974,” Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C., 1992, declassified 2013. The United States canceled the XB-70 bomber in 1961, and the U.S. Air Force changed its strategy for threatening the Soviet Union. Instead of dropping bombs from very high altitudes, the air force decided to send in low-flying, penetrating bombers. The Soviet air defenses at low altitudes were weak. In fact, both superpowers had struggled with this problem; radars of the 1960s could not detect flying objects that were very low because of the uneven contours of the earth. But the radar gap was more of a threat to the Soviet Union because of its vast borders, the longest in the world, and because NATO was sitting on its western front in Europe. The European flash point for conflict was far away from the United States but adjacent to the Soviet Union. The United States also sought to close the low-altitude gap with the E-3 airborne warning and control system (AWACS), able to spot low-flying targets for two hundred miles out, and the F-15 fighter, the first with look-down, shoot-down capability.