The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (8 page)

On the street, Guilsher learned to spot surveillance. The large Soviet-made Volga sedan used by the KGB had a V-8 engine with a distinct growl compared with the four-cylinder engine in other cars. John also discovered the smaller surveillance cars, the Zhigulis, often displayed a telltale, small triangle of dirt on the grille, apparently where the brushes at the KGB car wash didn’t reach.

Back when he was preparing for the Moscow assignment at CIA headquarters, Guilsher had seen the first note handed to Fulton by the Russian man at the gas station. He thought it sounded sincere and not typical of provocateurs or dangles. Later, working in the Moscow station in late 1977 and early 1978, Guilsher translated the notes given to Hathaway by the engineer. Guilsher thought it was unlikely that any of the man’s notes had fallen into the hands of the KGB. The man was careful to deliver them only when Hathaway was obscured by trees or a high snowbank.

Now they knew his name was Adolf Tolkachev. But what did he really want? Guilsher would find out. He was chosen to be Tolkachev’s first CIA case officer.

On March 5, 1978, four days after Tolkachev had given the package to Hathaway, John and Kissa Guilsher went to the Bolshoi Theatre for a ballet performance of
Anna Karenina
, choreographed by the famed ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. They dressed up for the occasion and sat in a box for diplomats. Kissa knew John had something to do that night, and when they sat down, she was surprised to discover that sitting next to her in the box was a Soviet woman who worked in the embassy, dispatching maids, drivers, and helpers. Her name was Galina, a slight, thin woman with dark hair whom Kissa knew well and believed to be working for the KGB.
8

John had told Kissa that at intermission he would go make a phone call. He would be free from surveillance for a few minutes, he thought, and he had already staked out the phone booth. As soon as the lights went up, he excused himself.

When John got up, Galina saw him, and she started to rise out of her seat, too. Kissa had to think fast. “Where are you going?” she asked. Galina said she was going to the ladies’ room. Kissa then tried to talk her out of it. There would be big crowds during intermission, she said. “Who wants to mingle with them?” It worked; Galina agreed it would be better to wait a few minutes.

The delay was just enough time for John to reach the pay phone and call Tolkachev.

Guilsher decided to follow Tolkachev’s instructions and introduce himself as Nikolai. He needed to reassure Tolkachev that the proper people had received all the materials that Tolkachev had provided and that the United States was interested in learning more. But it had to be done in a way that could not be detected if someone was listening to the call.
9

Standing at the phone booth, Guilsher made the call at about 10:00 p.m.

Tolkachev: Allo.

Guilsher: Hello, this is Nikolai.

Tolkachev: (
Slight pause
.) Yes, hello.

Guilsher: Finally I have reached you. I have received all your letters, thank you. They were very interesting. I will want to recontact you again later.

Tolkachev: You should be aware that on the 9th I’m going on temporary assignment to Ryazan, on Saturdays it might be difficult to reach me, it is best to call on Sunday like this.

(A pause. Tolkachev was apparently ready to say something else but did not.)

Guilsher: See you soon. Goodbye.

Tolkachev: Goodbye.
10

Guilsher went back to his seat in the theater and sat down. Kissa looked at him:
You okay?

Yes, he nodded as the curtain went up and the lights dimmed.

Hathaway had bridled at the stand-down. He felt Turner’s order to stop operations in Moscow was wrongheaded and costly. Certainly, the tantalizing first contact with Tolkachev suggested they should resume full espionage operations. In March, a crisis erupted involving Alexei Kulak, the overweight KGB officer who had been abandoned because of the stand-down. A message from headquarters informed Hathaway that Kulak, then living in Moscow, might face arrest and could be exposed as a spy for the United States. Hathaway felt a special obligation to Kulak, whom he had personally recruited in a New York hotel room. The problem, headquarters reported, was that a new book, just published by the author Edward Jay Epstein, contained enough details to pinpoint Kulak as an American agent. If the KGB followed up on details in the book and arrested him, Kulak would certainly face charges of treason, punishable by death. Headquarters decided that Kulak must be contacted and warned of the breach. A high-risk operation was hastily put together to spirit Kulak out of the Soviet Union, if necessary. Despite his misgivings about Moscow operations, and despite the stand-down, Turner approved the mission to warn Kulak.
11

To carry it out, Hathaway would have to evade KGB surveillance at all costs. Once a week, Hathaway’s secretary had set a familiar pattern of going ice-skating with her husband. Hathaway put on a disguise to look like his secretary, complete with a mask, and left the compound posing as her, with her ice skates in his lap and her husband driving. The militiamen at the gate didn’t notice. Once the car was far enough away from the gate, he ripped off the mask and, filled with anxiety, leaped out of the car. He didn’t know what to expect. When he saw all was quiet, he began a long, winding surveillance detection run for several hours on a cold Moscow night. His plan was to offer Kulak an escape from the Soviet Union, known as exfiltration. Hathaway carried a camera in order to get a recent photograph of Kulak for a new passport. In fact, the Moscow station had never before carried out an exfiltration. Such operations required months of planning, and Hathaway had only days.

After hours of walking the Moscow streets to make sure he was free from surveillance, Hathaway climbed the steps of Kulak’s building, planning to knock on the door. But a
dezhurnaya
, a female attendant, was sitting there, and she stopped Hathaway. He turned around and left, forced to abort the operation. The next night, he made another attempt and called Kulak on a pay phone from the street. Kulak immediately recognized Hathaway’s distinctive southern Virginia drawl. Hathaway delivered the news about the breach, and Kulak responded quietly, without hesitation or a sense of fear. He thanked Hathaway for the effort but said he would be fine and did not want to be smuggled out of the country. There was nothing more Hathaway could do. Hathaway and the CIA had lost Kulak as an intelligence source.
12

Despite the setback, Hathaway was eager to move ahead with Tolkachev. On March 21, 1978, he sent a cable to headquarters suggesting they move at “full speed.” At the start, he proposed to “pull together a basic commo package which we can first put down black,” meaning by a case officer who was not under KGB surveillance. Then the CIA would telephone Tolkachev and tell him where to pick it up. The package would give Tolkachev a basic means to send messages back and forth to the CIA, allowing them to probe deeper into what he knew and what he might be able to give them. Inside the package, Hathaway proposed to include an operations note, known as an ops note, providing Tolkachev instructions on what to do next. Hathaway felt a personal meeting was the fastest way to get answers, and he very much wanted a personal meeting. But it was also the riskiest way.
13
More than one uncertainty hung over the plan. The station did not yet know much about their agent, what he wanted, or what he could do.
14

In a reflective cable to headquarters, Hathaway wrote of Tolkachev,

Obviously, his demands or preconditions will have bearing on our choices in how to handle operation. Does he wish to exchange info for money? One time or indefinitely and continuously? Is exfiltration a demand? Non-negotiable? By when? In sum, without first knowing just what he has in view, it will be difficult to make detailed or long-run plans for him. Our impression, however, is that despite his “Belenko” remark, he is thinking about passing info over a period of time, wants a camera to maximize his productivity, and is eager to establish ongoing long-term relationship. Thus, while we must be prepared to be flexible until we learn just what
cksphere
’s terms are, we feel our best bet for now is to proceed with plans for straightforward ongoing communication with motivated agent whose needs can be reasonably and effectively satisfied. At the same time, we would try to learn early on what
cksphere
’s needs are, and make necessary adjustments of plans to satisfy them.
15

In the same message, Hathaway also raised the question of whether to issue a CIA miniature camera to Tolkachev at this early stage in an operation. A camera could make it easier for him to copy documents, but there were serious dangers if caught. A spy camera could easily incriminate him. “When do we give him one, and what kind do we give him?” Hathaway asked headquarters. “Obviously, the sooner we give
cksphere
a photo capability, and thereby the means to deliver bulk intel, the sooner we can resolve the bona fides question”—a reference to the CIA’s need for Tolkachev to prove his credentials.

But headquarters remained reluctant. Hathaway was instructed to use “as simple an approach as possible.” For now, there would be no document camera nor a personal meeting.

A cable from headquarters on March 24 acknowledged that the intelligence Tolkachev had provided so far “goes beyond what the Soviets would pass to us if this were a controlled case,” or a dangle. That was good news; at least Tolkachev’s information had passed the first hurdle. The CIA’s usual approach to testing the bona fides of an unknown source would be to check any
new
information and look for that which could be confirmed by what was already known from other sources. However, Tolkachev’s notes contained intelligence so new that it could not be verified. It might be a windfall, but it might be a trap; the question could not be easily resolved.
16

Hathaway had no choice but to take it slowly, one step at a time. He and Guilsher put together a new plan. The main purpose would be to clear up the uncertainty about the agent’s true identity and access and secondarily to see what more he could obtain in “positive intelligence,” the agency’s jargon for the fruits of spying. Hathaway and Guilsher wrote that they hoped to set up the communications with Tolkachev “in such a way as to minimize risk to us” but at the same time “we wish to reduce risk to
cksphere
to the bare minimum consistent with our own protection.” They added, “Unfortunately, here we confront a tradeoff: what is safest for us may be most risky for him, and vice versa. What we are looking for, then, is optimum balance of protection to both ourselves and agent.”
17

Still, headquarters was stubbornly doubtful. An internal review at Langley on April 13 again cast doubt, warning that even if Tolkachev’s initial approach the year before had been genuine, he might have been noticed by the KGB during his attempts to contact the CIA. He could be carrying out a KGB deception operation, designed to fool the Americans. The review concluded there was only a 50 percent chance that the Tolkachev operation was valid. Such a conclusion was a big red flag for the CIA leadership that made it even harder for Hathaway to proceed.

Turner, the CIA director, was briefed on May 7. Two days later, in Moscow, Guilsher called Tolkachev and told him to wait for two or three more weeks and that after that he’d be needed for about an hour on the appointed day. Tolkachev said he had no plans for vacation.

He would wait.

Then, in May 1978, headquarters began to see things in a more favorable light. One of Tolkachev’s handwritten notes was passed to the CIA’s Office of Technical Service for analysis by handwriting experts. The experts observed, “The writer is intelligent, purposeful, and generally self-confident. He is self-disciplined but not overly rigid. He has well above average intelligence and has a good organizing ability. He is observant and conscientious and pays meticulous attention to details. He is quite self-assured and may plow ahead at times in a way which is not discreet or subtle. All in all, he is a reasonable, well-adjusted individual and appears intellectually and psychologically equipped to become a useful, versatile asset.”
18

On May 17, headquarters sent a cable to the Moscow station that contained a far more positive evaluation of the Tolkachev material. The CIA’s analysts found nothing to contradict what Tolkachev had passed them so far. The evaluation concluded that “many of the details in the reports agree with data from other sources and available technical analysis” and “there do not appear to be any other data which conflict with details in the reports.” So, the cable went on, headquarters was feeling “a strong temptation” to accept the new information Tolkachev had provided, not the least because it tended to confirm their own previous speculation about Soviet fighter developments. But at the same time, doubts at headquarters lingered. The cable reported, “Since the data would have a major impact on our assessments of air defense capabilities, we are resisting, at least until bona fides are established, the temptations to accept in toto the contents of the reports.”
19

It was progress—but still not a green light for the kind of operation Hathaway wanted to carry out. He was impatient. Nearly a year and a half had already gone by since Tolkachev’s first approach at the gas station, and they still did not have a working relationship with him.

With Guilsher and others in the station, Hathaway began planning what they would give the agent in their first package. If there was to be a list of intelligence questions, how should they be phrased so they would not appear too blunt? Where to put down the package so it could easily be retrieved by Tolkachev but not discovered by the KGB? What should Tolkachev do in response?

The Moscow station planned to use a dead drop, the classic impersonal exchange. Inside the package would be instructions for preparing three letters in “secret writing” to the CIA. On one side of the letter—the “cover” side—the CIA had penned what would appear to be a letter from an excited Western tourist, in a flowery and feminine handwriting. “Dear Gramps,” it began. “Zounds! I can’t really believe it. But here I am in Russia! Thank you, thank you—a million times thank you for convincing Mikey and me to include Russia on our itinerary. It is absolutely fantastic.” But on the reverse or “secret” side, Tolkachev was told, he could use concealed writing, answering the CIA’s questions and providing more intelligence. The secret writing was imprinted by use of a specially treated carbon paper that the CIA provided to Tolkachev. After writing on the secret side of the “Dear Gramps” letter, Tolkachev was told to fold it up and put it in the regular mail in Moscow, to an overseas address that looked innocuous but was in fact controlled by the CIA. If all went according to plan, the secret writing would be invisible if the KGB opened the letter, but it could be deciphered by the CIA when the letter was received.