The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (25 page)

Tolkachev informed the CIA he would accept precious valuables in lieu of cash, which he had previously rejected. Soon after this message was received, Thomas Mills, head of the U.S.S.R. branch in the division, got a most unusual assignment. He and his wife, Joby, were asked to go to New York and find some valuables for Tolkachev—with agency money. Joby, who had studied art in New York City, was thrilled. They went to A La Vieille Russie on Fifth Avenue, a jewelry and antiques store established in 1851. In the elegant shop, the CIA official and his wife bought a very small but pricey Fabergé pin and a heavy gold necklace. They brought them back to headquarters for shipping off to the Moscow station in the pouch. Mills was told that if any questions arose, Tolkachev would explain that the jewelry had been left to him by his mother.
24

The worry about Tolkachev after Plunkert’s meeting with him led the Moscow station to think again about whether it might be necessary to suddenly exfiltrate him from the Soviet Union. By early 1983, the station had written up a detailed plan to remove Tolkachev, his wife, and their son. The CIA had done it in Moscow only once before, with Sheymov, his wife, and their daughter, although exfiltration had been successful in other countries. The CIA had even built special containers for smuggling people. But there was no enthusiasm at headquarters for exfiltration of Tolkachev. The Moscow station plan landed with a thud at Langley. The station was getting ahead of itself, headquarters advised. Exfiltration with the family would be a “soul-searching” question for Tolkachev and had not even been discussed with him for more than two years.
25

Nevertheless, the station was undeterred, perhaps out of an abundance of caution. Two plans were drawn up, one long-range and the other for an emergency. The station composed a long, personal questionnaire for Tolkachev, to be delivered at the next meeting, asking for passport photographs and probing Tolkachev for clothing measurements, medical history, locations of his friends and relatives, vacation procedures, and methods for calling in sick at work. “Is your family aware of our relationship?” the CIA asked. “If not, how do you plan to tell them?”

They did not know that he had already promised his wife he would quit spying.
26

“Deep cover” had become an essential method for CIA clandestine operations in Moscow. But the work of a deep cover officer was far different from what confronted Guilsher and Rolph. They had been advisers and confessors to Tolkachev. In contrast, deep cover officers worked at a distance from the station and from the agent. It was lonely, stressful, and risky. Robert Morris thought the relentless pressures of the job and the isolation were more like being an undercover cop.

Morris arrived in Moscow carrying a briefcase, and his documents identified him as nothing more than a State Department bureaucrat, one of the unremarkable administrative workers needed at the embassy. He played that role to the hilt, but he had arrived for a different purpose. He became the second deep cover officer assigned to the Moscow station, hoping to fulfill his ambition to be at the forefront of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.

Morris, son of a high school sports coach who’d grown up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, attended an all-boys New England college prep school and went on to Georgetown University. Restless at the university after just one semester, he left the school and volunteered for the draft at the peak of the war in Vietnam. A gung ho soldier who thrived in three years of hard training, he rose to become a first lieutenant in the Special Forces, second-in-command of a Green Beret A team, one of the most elite military detachments in the world. He was assigned to serve in Vietnam in 1971, but the war began to ebb, and he did not go. During all the rigorous training—airborne, underwater, and jungle warfare—Morris got to know an intel sergeant who had emigrated from the Ukraine and shared fascinating stories of life in the Soviet Union. Morris was drawn to the mystery of it all and took Russian-language lessons. When he left the service in 1972, he returned to Georgetown University to study Russian—and play football.

Morris dreamed of adventure. After graduation and knocking about in business for a few years, he was recruited by the CIA. When he arrived at headquarters in October 1980, he had just turned thirty years old. His hair was fashionably combed across his forehead, and he wore aviator-style glasses that gave him a modish look. Morris completed his training in the top echelon of his class. He arrived in Moscow in early July 1982. After he spent months carrying out his job as a bureaucrat, the KGB swallowed the cover story and lost interest in Morris, and he was ready to begin espionage operations.

Before a meeting with Tolkachev, both Guilsher and Rolph had spent hours planning in the station. But as a deep cover officer, Morris was on his own. When he sketched out a surveillance detection run, he had to send it to the station by the cumbersome equivalent of an interoffice dead drop—usually writing it out on water-soluble paper and emplacing it discreetly, such as sticking it with a magnet on a fire extinguisher somewhere inside the embassy, to be picked up by another case officer, and the process reversed when the station sent him an answer. He experienced very little of the camaraderie of the Moscow station. He did not write letters to the agent. He did not prepare packages; he just delivered them.

When there was an operation to be carried out, Morris went to the station for a brief meeting, no more than ten or fifteen minutes, taking a secret entrance. He memorized his instructions, and when there was a package disguised as a brick or a log, he put it in his briefcase and carried it back to his cover job in an administrative office full of Soviet employees, where he would sit tight, never daring to take his eye off the briefcase until he could go home.

His role was to be the perfect courier. The KGB overlooked Morris for many months as he moved about Moscow, filling dead drops for the station’s various operations. He had to watch every word and every action. It was like acting on a stage, constantly, for months and months on end—never forgetting a line. The spring of 1983 was exceptionally busy. One night, in an unprecedented feat, Morris placed two dead drops in a row, in distant locations, without the KGB’s catching even a glimpse of him. But Morris felt isolated. He had no way to let his hair down. He had to live his cover as a bureaucrat, and that meant no discussion at home, either, even though his wife had participated in most of the nighttime runs. After months of clandestine activity in which he escaped KGB notice, Morris drew a far more sensitive assignment—to meet Tolkachev in person.
27

On March 16, he set out on a long surveillance detection run by car, by bus, and then on foot. Because his cover was that of a State Department bureaucrat, Morris did not wear the radio scanner that had helped Rolph listen to KGB transmissions; it would be awfully hard to explain if he were caught. Without the radio, he would have to make a judgment call about surveillance on his own instincts and observations. Two hours later, free from surveillance, he reached the planned site, a streetcar stop. A dozen people were waiting. Morris was excited; the adrenaline was rushing through him. He met Tolkachev after dark and walked to Tolkachev’s car, parked at a nearby apartment building. Inside the car, Morris felt tense, but Tolkachev was calm and behaved as if he had been doing this forever. They handed each other packages: Morris gave Tolkachev a note that brought up exfiltration, outlined how the operation would work, and included the questionnaire. Tolkachev handed over to Morris seventeen rolls of film and a very long ops note, forty-two pages. The materials included surprising new intelligence about a “target recognition system” being developed for the MiG-29 fighter.

Morris thought Tolkachev looked good, his morale seemed high, and Tolkachev smiled when Morris presented him with the architectural drawing materials for his son. Morris said the CIA wanted to get answers soon about exfiltration—in April, if possible. Although Tolkachev hesitated, he agreed to a meeting in early April. They said farewell to each other after only twelve minutes.

Once he got home, at 10:00 p.m., Morris left the rolls of film in his coat pocket. He did not want to take them out, in case the KGB had a concealed video camera in the apartment. Late that night, he slipped into a closet in his apartment, curled onto the floor, and, by flashlight, wrote out a memo by hand on water-soluble paper to the Moscow station describing the meeting and what he had seen. This was the work of a deep cover operative—hiding in the bottom of his closet.

Tolkachev’s ops note revealed that he had been through three “crises” of high blood pressure and was feeling exhausted. “It has become more difficult for me to work intensively, I tire much easier,” he said. While in the past he would often go to the Lenin Library after work and quietly spend a few hours there, he said, “I am not always able to do that now.” He asked the CIA to find some ginseng root, which he had heard was a stimulant, and a Russian organic medicine.

The note also contained another list of personal requests, primarily books for himself and his son. He wanted materials about Western architecture, not only with photographs, but also with English text, to help Oleg with his language skills. Tolkachev asked the CIA to find “topical detective stories” for his son, saying they were being passed around in paperback by his friends whose parents bought them abroad. Tolkachev requested more books about the Soviet Union that were factual, not polemics. His curiosity centered on the years of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalin period, when his wife’s family had been so brutally repressed. “Generally, an objective interpretation of the history of the October Revolution and Russian life in the 20s and 30s would definitely interest me,” he wrote. He told the CIA he had devoured Trotsky’s memoir,
My Life
, but was less interested in some of the other, more propagandistic books about the early Soviet years. He added, “I am interested in the memoirs of famous world political and military figures, writers, actors, artists, architects, etc.” He asked for books with all kinds of political views, progressive and reactionary, and also wanted “the most important speeches, appearances, declarations of western political leaders,” which were often unavailable in the Soviet Union.

Tolkachev said his wish list included the following:

1. Bible (in Russian)

2. Booklet, published in Washington, “About Soviet Military Power” (preferably in Russian)

3. Reagan’s speech in which he mentioned Lenin’s 10 principles

4. Memoirs of Golda Meir

5. Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
(in Russian)

6. Solzhenitsyn’s book
August 1914
28

At first, headquarters was glad to hear from Morris that Tolkachev seemed to be in good shape and immediately began gathering all the books he asked for. “Absolutely delighted to hear that
cksphere
is his old self again, in good spirits and improved health and apparently ‘rarin’ to get on with his work for us,” headquarters cabled to the Moscow station on March 22.
29

But a closer look at Tolkachev’s long ops note told a different story. The station sent back a message, within hours, saying Tolkachev, “a driven man,” was struggling with his health and was “pushing himself hard.” The station was also puzzled about the rolls of film Tolkachev had brought Morris. If the security restrictions were so tight—and he had not reported any change—how was he able to shoot seventeen rolls of film?
30

On April 1, headquarters reported the film had been developed and printed “with excellent results,” including approximately 525 pages of secret documents. “We use the word approximately because there are multiple fold-out pages of diagrams,” headquarters reported. “In any event, another good job by
cksphere
.”
31

Tolkachev had promised to give the CIA an answer about exfiltration and signaled for another meeting on April 23. Morris went and found him at 8:55 p.m. This time, because a group of children were playing noisily near Tolkachev’s parked car, he drove a few blocks away and parked in a quiet spot on a nearby street. Time was short, but Tolkachev was firm: exfiltration was out of the question. He gave the envelope with the exfiltration plan back to Morris. At the same time, Morris handed back to Tolkachev the sensitive materials he had provided at the March meeting on the MiG-29 target recognition system. This was a standard procedure, to return to Tolkachev any original written materials once the CIA had seen them.

Tolkachev handed over fourteen rolls of film, despite all his complaints of tight security. He told Morris he had “circumvented” the system: details would be found in his twelve-page ops note. “It is extremely difficult just to sit and not produce,” he added. Morris was out of the car and on his way in fifteen minutes.
32

It soon became clear to the Moscow station that Tolkachev was taking more risks than ever. In his note, Tolkachev explained that in the early morning doors to the laboratory were unlocked around 7:30 but actual work didn’t get under way until about 8:00. For five minutes after the doors were unlocked, he said, no one was present. “This is what I took advantage of,” he wrote. Even so, he had to bring the camera to work three times “since it was only on the third time that I was able to get five minutes when nobody was in the lab.” Tolkachev also described a “ruse” in which he had told others that a secret document was being examined by a supervisor at midday, but in fact he took it home to photograph. “This ruse, of course, is very risky,” he acknowledged, “and it’s not possible to use it more than two or three times.”

Tolkachev’s note explained his change of heart about exfiltration. He and his wife had close friends who left for Israel and then for the United States, he said. They had written back that they were growing nostalgic for Moscow. Tolkachev quoted his own wife as saying, “How can people decide to leave to who-knows-where? As far as I am concerned, I know for sure that I would immediately begin to suffer from nostalgia. Not only could I not live in another country but I couldn’t even live in another city in the Soviet Union.”