The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (31 page)

A
dolf Tolkachev fell into the dark place he feared most—the hands of the KGB. He was interrogated in prison and confessed to spying but steadfastly insisted his family did not know. The KGB found plenty of incriminating evidence, including stacks of rubles, the Tropel spy cameras, and the CIA’s maps, sketches, and meeting schedules. The KGB also discovered the library sign-out sheet the CIA forged to cover Tolkachev’s tracks and the pen with the L-pill inside.
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Tolkachev was convicted of espionage and sentenced to death by a three-member military tribunal. As the sentence was announced, Tolkachev stood straight upright, wearing a loose-fitting sport coat and open-collared shirt, eyeglasses in his breast pocket. Two guards flanked him, seated.

“Give your name correctly,” the judge demanded.

“Tol-ka-chev,” he replied firmly. “Adolf Georgievich.” He gave his age, birthplace, and education.

Where did you work before the arrest, and in what position?

“Before my arrest, I had worked at the Research Institute of Radio Engineering, in the position of chief designer.”

The judge read out the verdict: guilty of treason in the form of espionage, punishable by death.

Tolkachev looked straight ahead, emotionless. The two guards stood and grasped him by the elbows.

Later, his appeal for clemency was rejected.
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After the sentence was declared, Tolkachev was granted a farewell visit by his son, Oleg, for fifteen minutes in a crowded prison conference room. Tolkachev had worried about his son all the years of his spying. The moment was difficult for both of them. Oleg was just as scornful of the Soviet system as his parents. He remembered his mother and father reading the prohibited works of Solzhenitsyn. But he never asked where the Western rock music and the drawing pens had come from. He never knew of his father’s spying.

Tolkachev told his son he was sorry. Oleg replied, “No, no, no”—that he shouldn’t say it.
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President Reagan, who was briefed by Stansfield Turner on the eve of his first inaugural about the agent in Moscow, now got the whole story of how Tolkachev had been betrayed. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board laid out the details in a secret report that Reagan took to Camp David to read on September 26, 1986. Both the CIA and the FBI were sharply criticized in the report; the CIA was taken to task for not reporting sooner to the FBI that Howard could be a security risk.
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The advisory board came to the Oval Office on October 2 to brief Reagan. In handwritten notes from the meeting, the White House chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, noted that “in one year” of training at CIA Howard “picked up quite a bit.”
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All of which was now lost.

On October 22, 1986, the Soviet news agency Tass announced that Tolkachev had been executed for “high treason in the form of spying.”
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Natasha was also prosecuted on grounds that she knew of Tolkachev’s espionage activity. Libin, her former supervisor and family friend, wrote later that she did not confess, but was betrayed to the KGB by an informer in prison. She was sentenced to three years. She served the first at Potma, a harsh labor camp 242 miles southeast of Moscow that had been part of the Soviet gulag. For the second year, she was transferred to a less severe penal colony, making bricks, in Ufa, 730 miles east of Moscow, where Oleg managed to visit her. She was released after two years under a broad amnesty and returned to Moscow in 1987. She could not resume her profession as an engineer, so she found work as a duty operator in a boiler room. She kept her head high, read books, and paid attention to the lively politics of the Gorbachev period. She went to Memorial, the group formed during the glasnost era to preserve the memory of those who perished in Stalin’s camps, and wrote out the details of how her parents had been repressed, noting that both were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.
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In 1990, Natasha was stricken with ovarian cancer. She wrote to the American embassy saying she was seriously ill and asking for medical assistance. She said she was the wife of Adolf Tolkachev, who “worked for the benefit of America and for freedom in our country for many years,” according to Libin, who helped her draft the letter. Libin recalled that the embassy wrote back simply saying they got many requests and could not help everyone who asked. The embassy apparently did not recognize who she was. The CIA only learned of her appeal years later.
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Natasha remained angry about only one thing: Adik had misled her and continued his espionage after he promised to stop. It was not the spying that she objected to but the danger to the family. She died of cancer on March 31, 1991, just as the Soviet party-state that she and Adik had both loathed was about to expire. She was laid to rest alongside her father, Ivan Kuzmin, the newspaper editor, in Moscow’s Donskoye Cemetery.
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On August 11, 2014, the CIA hung a portrait of Tolkachev at headquarters alongside other paintings that depict the agency’s greatest operations. The portrait by the artist Kathy Krantz Fieramosca of New York shows Tolkachev in his apartment, his hands grasping the Pentax 35 mm camera, photographing a secret document illuminated by two desk lamps. A clock shows 12:30 p.m., the end of the lunch break. At the unveiling ceremony, a senior CIA official said that Tolkachev is portrayed in the painting with “fierce determination,” “intense concentration,” and, knowing his fate if caught, “a trace of fear.”

O
n January 19, 1991, the third day of Operation Desert Storm, Larry Pitts roused himself at 4:00 a.m. at the King Faisal Air Base at Tabuk, northwestern Saudi Arabia. He ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs and pita bread, listened to the intelligence briefing, suited up, fastened on his survival vest, grabbed his helmet bag, and headed out to the tarmac. In the predawn darkness stood an F-15C fighter, the most advanced warplane ever built by the United States and the most lethal air-to-air combatant in history. Sixty-four feet long, with a wingspan of forty-three feet, built of aluminum, titanium, steel, and fiberglass, the fighter had twin Pratt & Whitney turbofans that could send it straight up in the sky, like a rocket. Everything about the F-15 was the pinnacle of American technology, from a powerful pulse-Doppler look-down radar, to wings that could survive battle damage, to sophisticated electronic jammers inside a black box tucked behind the pilot.

Pitts was preparing to fly a fighter that was designed, down to the smallest detail, to defeat Soviet MiGs. Saddam Hussein’s air force possessed one of the largest fleets of MiG warplanes outside the Soviet Union. In the first two days of war, the aerial battles over Iraq followed the same scenario that had been written for the skies over Europe if hostilities broke out in the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union designed, built, and deployed air superiority fighters that, it was assumed, would face each other over Germany and Czechoslovakia. But the battles over Iraq showed they were not evenly matched. The American pilots and their warplanes had an edge, gained from intensive training and penetrating intelligence, especially the fruits of espionage by Adolf Tolkachev.

On this morning, Captain Pitts walked slowly around the aircraft for a visual check, scanned the logbook, then climbed into the cockpit. Once in the sky, he enjoyed stunning visibility in all directions. The plane sloped down from the pilot’s shoulders. The sensation was like sitting on the end of a pencil.
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Pitts was airborne at 5:00 a.m., flying as the right wingman in a “four-ship,” a formation of four F-15C aircraft. Operation Desert Storm was a military campaign to force Iraq out of Kuwait. The Fifty-Eighth Tactical Fighter Squadron of the U.S. Air Force Thirty-Third Tactical Fighter Wing, known informally as the Gorillas, had already flown three missions into Iraq. Pitts was thirty-four years old and had longed to fly since he was a boy growing up in Anchorage, Alaska.

In the U.S. Air Force, he had trained for hundreds of hours on the F-15C, but this was his first war—and his first days in combat.

Pitts and the plane he was flying embodied what the air force and the navy had learned from the debacle of Vietnam. Back then, F-4 Phantom pilots had often been outgunned by Soviet-built MiG fighters flown by the North Vietnamese. The Phantom pilots needed to flip twelve switches to fire a missile; they lost precious seconds to the more nimble MiGs. By contrast, in the F-15 cockpit a pilot could search for, detect, lock on, and fire at an approaching MiG without ever taking his hands off the throttle and stick or looking down from his heads-up display. He just had to move the fingers of his left and right hands on buttons, what pilots called playing the piccolo. The F-15C’s chaff dispensers carried dielectric fibers that were cut to lengths designed precisely to blind MiG radars. The F-15C tactical electronic warfare suite was wired to thwart Soviet avionics. The F-15C could accurately target and fire a missile at an enemy MiG beyond visual range, or so far away that Pitts could not see it.

In Vietnam, American pilots used rigid tactics, flying in close formations that were easily outfoxed by the North Vietnamese fighters. After the war, the United States transformed pilot training, and a new generation was encouraged to be more flexible and make their own combat decisions. Soviet pilots had traditionally been told what to do from the ground; Americans were trained to know the enemy’s capabilities and counter them on the fly. To help them react faster, data links were built to bring American pilots all the information they needed at high speed. Pitts was a product of this transformation in training. He had flown three “Red Flag” exercises, simulating possible dogfights against a Soviet bloc adversary. He had studied the threat manuals on the MiG-25 and the MiG-29, and his generation of pilots had benefited from information gleaned from
constant peg
, a top secret operation in which air force pilots trained against older Soviet-built MiGs in the Nevada desert.

Pitts and the other three F-15C pilots refueled from an aerial tanker and then waited. A bombing mission they were assigned to accompany was canceled. For a while, they remained aloft because of intelligence that Saddam Hussein might flee Iraq. By midday, it appeared Hussein wasn’t going anywhere, and the four-ship returned to their base in Saudi Arabia. Pitts was thinking about getting some sleep.

Just minutes after touchdown, the Gorillas were ordered to refuel and take off again. The mission was to fly over Iraq to see if the Americans could goad the reluctant Iraqi air force into the sky. In the early days of the war, it was an important objective to win total air superiority. Saddam possessed twenty-five of the fast MiG-25 interceptors and thirty of the latest MiG-29 fighters, with look-down, shoot-down radar, as well as hundreds of older Soviet-built aircraft. Iraq had been at war with Iran for eight years in the previous decade, so it was safe to assume that Iraqi pilots were experienced. But the Iraqis were avoiding an air battle, and not many were flying.

During the aerial refueling over Saudi Arabia, Pitts and his four-ship got word that two groups of “bogies”—unidentified planes—had been spotted by the powerful U.S. airborne early warning and control system, the E-3 Sentry, or AWACS, another technological triumph that could scan the airspace for hundreds of miles around. The four-ship headed north toward Iraq at slightly over the speed of sound, with Pitts on the right side of the formation.

Then the bogies became “bandits,” positively identified as Iraqi fighters. Two of them were MiG-29s, and two were MiG-25s. The more modern MiG-29s veered away. But the high-speed MiG-25s were barreling directly at Pitts.

The MiG-25 once inspired fear in the West, where some thought it was the fastest aerial fighter in the world. But after Belenko flew a MiG-25 to Japan in 1976, it was found to be an interceptor, not a maneuvering fighter. From his training, Pitts knew the MiG-25 was powered by mammoth engines, but he also knew its limitations. The plane was sluggish at low altitudes, and the cockpit set low in the fuselage, so the pilot could not easily see behind him. The turning radius was wide. The radar’s scan was narrow. The MiG-25 was no longer the mystery it once was: the United States knew about every wire and rivet.
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Two of the F-15Cs peeled away from the four-ship, leaving Pitts and his lead, Captain Rick Tollini, to deal with the MiG-25s. The Iraqi planes circled and came back again, straight at the Americans, who were flying at about fifteen thousand feet.

Suddenly the MiG-25s turned at “beam,” or ninety degrees away from the oncoming American fighters, and dived to the deck—almost to the ground—covered with a low-lying fog. The break toward the deck was a classic Soviet tactic; at ninety degrees, there was a “notch” where the Doppler radar was weakest and might not see a moving target against the ground clutter. Pitts lost the MiG-25s from his radar. He feared the MiGs would reappear and take a shot at him before he could shoot them down.

The MiG-25 was not a ballet dancer in the air; it was a hurtling bullet. One of them returned almost instantly. Pitts got a radar signal: the plane was five miles off his nose. He was now at about thirteen thousand feet, but the MiG-25 was barely five hundred feet off the ground, flying left to right in front of him. The MiG-25 rocketed at 700 knots, or 805 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound. The pilot probably did not see Pitts above him and might not have cared; he was trying to outrun danger. The astounding speed of the MiG-25 “gimballed” the F15’s radar: it zoomed across, left to right, and exited the screen.

Pitts did not give up. He had lost radar lock again but could visually see the MiG-25, and all his training and his reflexes kicked in.

“Engaged!” he called to Tollini.

“Press!” Tollini responded—which meant that Pitts was now the shooter and Tollini would support him.

Pitts threw the F-15C into an inverted roll, known as a split-S maneuver. The F-15C dived after the MiG-25. The force of the roll thrust Pitts deep into his seat, at twelve times the force of gravity, for several seconds. The F-15C was rated for about nine times gravity. In his headpiece, Pitts heard the onboard computer shout a warning, “Over G! Over G!” But it was too late, his adrenaline was pumping, his decision made. He needed to align his plane’s nose with the fleeing MiG-25 so he could shoot. Pitts dived twelve thousand feet and pulled up a mile or so behind the MiG-25, just slightly higher, and in pursuit. In the old days, an American pilot might have tried to fly under his quarry for a better radar lock, but Pitts enjoyed superb radar coverage in the F-15C and could stay just above and behind. He was in the “six” of the MiG-25, meaning at six o’clock, right behind him, putting the Iraqi pilot in mortal danger.

If the MiG-25 had blasted straight ahead at full speed, he might have outrun Pitts. But he did not. The pilot banked to the right, an evasive move, realizing that Pitts was preparing to fire. The Soviet-built plane slowed as it turned in the thicker air near the ground. Pitts banked too, but his turning radius was tighter, and his plane far more nimble. Soon he was advancing inside the MiG’s turning circle, closing the gap, slightly behind the wing line of the enemy plane, the most vulnerable position for the MiG.

Pitts had eight missiles under the F-15C’s belly and wings. He saw a big heat plume behind the MiG-25, an afterburner, so with his left hand he selected a 150-pound AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile. He fired the missile with his right hand by pressing a button on the piccolo. But the MiG-25 just as quickly emitted a curtain of flares, which decoyed the missile, and it missed.

Pitts selected a 500-pound, radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow missile, and when it locked on the enemy plane, a cue on the heads-up display flashed: “SHOOT.” Pitts fired. The missile was designed to detonate next to the target, but a fuse malfunctioned; it flew right over the cockpit of the fleeing MiG without exploding and fell away.

Pitts quickly selected another heat-seeking Sidewinder missile. Now six thousand feet behind the MiG, he fired, but flares again threw it off.

Pitts had never fired a missile in combat; now he had fired three without success. The two planes, their history wrapped up in the Cold War, were thundering across the Iraqi desert, the MiG-25 at three hundred feet and the F-15C just above and behind, both now slower than before, but still at 575 miles per hour.

On his fourth try, Pitts selected another radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow missile. This time, it flew right up the exhaust pipe of the MiG and blew it up. The MiG pilot ejected, and Pitts saw the seat whiz by his window. Just as the MiG exploded, another missile pierced the cloud—it was fired by Tollini. The fate of the pilot was not known, but ejecting at such high speed and low altitude is often not survivable.

Minutes later, Tollini downed the other MiG-25.

Heading back toward Saudi Arabia, Pitts tried to relax. He was low on fuel. After the rush of the engagement, his hands were shaking. At the tanker refueling, he had to back off, calm himself, and try again.

The two MiG-29s that Pitts and Tollini had seen earlier were shot down later that day. Three MiG-29s and two MiG-21s were shot down on January 17. The Iraqi losses continued, day after day. By the end of the war, U.S. Air Force planes had shot down thirty-nine airborne enemy aircraft, without losing one.
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Sixteen of the U.S. kills involved missile shots that were fired beyond visual range, at fighters the U.S. pilots could not even see, a remarkable new dimension in air combat, made possible because the U.S. fighters, guided by AWACS, could shoot with little risk of accidentally hitting friendly aircraft.
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In direct aerial combat over Iraq, the U.S. Air Force downed every Soviet-built tactical fighter that it confronted. The reasons were many: superior technology, finely honed tactics, and vastly improved pilot training. But all of these advantages were bolstered by something less visible. The United States had collected every scrap of information it could find about Soviet planes, pilots, and radars, every photograph, diagram, and circuit board that could be obtained—by any means.

And for this, there was a spy.

Adolf Tolkachev’s espionage is a Cold War story, but one that still resonates today. Human source intelligence remains indispensable to national security. As long as it is necessary to know an adversary—to steal secrets, uncover intentions, and crack open safes—it will be essential to recruit agents who can conquer their fear and cross over to the other side. It will be necessary to look them in the eye, earn their trust, calm their anxiety, and share their peril.

Tolkachev, an engineer and designer, stood apart from others who betrayed the Soviet Union and became agents for the United States. He did not belong to the Communist Party or serve in the military or the security agencies. Most of the others came from either the KGB or the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, including Penkovsky, Popov, Sheymov, Polyakov, and Kulak. Kuklinski, the agent in Poland who passed revealing material about Warsaw Pact war plans, was a Polish army colonel. Ogorodnik was a Soviet diplomat.

What makes Tolkachev’s espionage even more remarkable is that he passed materials to the CIA literally under the nose of the KGB. Most of the twenty-one meetings were held within three miles of the front entrance of the KGB headquarters. Yet the spy and his handlers were never detected by the KGB. The Moscow station’s painstaking tradecraft—identity transfer, street disguises, surveillance detection runs, the SRR-100 radio monitors—paid off handsomely.