The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (32 page)

The nature of the material from Tolkachev—the complex diagrams, specifications, blueprints, and circuit boards from airborne radars and the disclosure of Soviet military research and development plans stretching a decade into the future—was extraordinary. Two U.S. intelligence and military experts who examined thousands of pages of Tolkachev’s documents over a period of years said they never found a single page contaminated with disinformation, and they cross-checked the intelligence as far as they could with other sources.
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Tolkachev opened a window on Soviet intentions and capabilities, which were at the core of the CIA’s mission. For the leadership of the United States, it was vitally important to know Soviet priorities in military research and development, as well as capabilities—what they could do and could not do. For decades, there were holes and misjudgments in U.S. intelligence on Soviet intentions and capabilities.
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But when it came to air defenses, Soviet tactical fighters, interceptors, radars, avionics, and guidance systems that would confront Americans in any hot war, Tolkachev delivered.

His intelligence arrived just as the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force were undertaking the revolution in pilot training in classrooms at the navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School, known as Top Gun, in Miramar, California, and the U.S. Air Force Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. No scrap was too small for those preparing to fight the next American air war. Intelligence gleaned from Tolkachev’s documents was briefed to Top Gun instructors and pilots.

As a result, the United States has enjoyed almost total air superiority over Soviet-built fighters for more than two decades: in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, in which Pitts downed the MiG-25 over Iraq; in 1995, when the U.S. and its allies forced the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia to recognize the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina; and in 1999, in stopping an ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo. Both Iraq and Yugoslavia flew Soviet-made MiG warplanes. There were American losses to ground fire, but the United States dominated the skies. The record is stark: for every six enemy aircraft air force pilots shot down in Korea, the United States lost one. In Vietnam, the United States lost one airplane for every two enemy planes shot down. Thus, the kill ratios went from six to one in Korea, and two to one in Vietnam, to forty-eight to zero for the air force in the wars in Iraq and the Balkans. The impressive advances in American technology and pilot training were essential to this achievement.
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But Tolkachev’s espionage also contributed; the United States possessed the blueprints of radar in every major Soviet fighter of the 1980s.

Tolkachev also provided the United States with renewed confidence in weapons systems that cost billions of dollars and took years to develop, especially those designed to strike the Soviet Union at low altitude. The terrain-hugging, winged cruise missile was flight-tested and deployed in the years of Tolkachev’s espionage. The Soviet leaders knew it was a potent threat. In Moscow on June 4, 1984, Anatoly Chernyaev, who later became Mikhail Gorbachev’s national security adviser, went to a military briefing at the Central Committee. The briefing was titled “The Characteristics of Modern Warfare,” and Chernyaev wrote in his diary afterward that he saw films about American weapons systems.

“It was amazing,” he wrote, “missiles homing in on their targets from hundreds and thousands of kilometers away; aircraft carriers, submarines that could do anything; winged missiles that, like in a cartoon, could be guided through a canyon and hit a target 10 meters in diameter from 2,500 kilometers away. An incredible breakthrough of modern technology. And, of course, unthinkably expensive.”
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The “winged missiles” were not a cartoon; the U.S. cruise missile was a reality. The Soviet radars could not see them coming, and the CIA knew why.

Adolf Tolkachev’s espionage produced intelligence so voluminous that the U.S. military and intelligence community continued to draw on it for valuable details well into the 1990s. The information became part of the finished intelligence reports of the era that were sent to the White House and policy makers, many of which are now declassified. The highest-level reports, National Intelligence Estimates, blend reporting and analysis and include details from many different sources. They do not mention Tolkachev by name. But they reflect the impact of his spying.

In March 1976, a year before Tolkachev first volunteered, a U.S. intelligence memorandum described Soviet air defenses as deficient, including the lack of a look-down, shoot-down radar and weapons capability.
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That was the view of the CIA’s in-house analysts, but in the summer and early autumn the CIA sought a second opinion about Soviet capabilities. In an unusual experiment, the CIA allowed an outside team of hawkish experts and analysts to critique its annual estimate of Soviet forces. Among other things, the critique examined Soviet air defenses.
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The outside team, known as Team B, was quite uncertain. It found evidence that Soviet air defenses, measured by equipment, were becoming “formidable” but, given operational problems seen in troop exercises, could be “marginal,” and the actual situation was unknown because “hard intelligence” was lacking.
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Thus, the CIA had multiple answers to sort out: Soviet air defenses were weak, or strong and growing stronger.

The United States needed a better answer. The Soviet Union possessed the longest borders in the world, about thirty-seven thousand miles. To stop intruders, it needed weapons and radars both on land and in the air. If there were gaps in its air defenses, they could be exploited. Within a few years, Tolkachev provided the answer: the system was weak, and the vulnerability could be exploited.

In 1979, a National Intelligence Estimate reaffirmed the Soviets had “major technical deficiencies in their ability to intercept penetrators at low altitudes.”
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In 1981, a CIA internal memorandum noted that the Soviet Union had little capability against low-flying targets, Soviet air defenses were technically crude, and “they rarely practice low altitude air defense operations.” Moreover, the command-and-control system for air defenses was poor, and its troops “are not among the best and often perform poorly in training exercises.” The bottom line, the memo concluded, there is “a widely held feeling that the Soviets are really quite inept in this area.”
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In 1983, a U.S. intelligence report asserted that low-flying U.S. cruise missiles and advanced bombers “have the potential to render obsolescent billions of rubles in Soviet investment” in air defenses—they could fly right under them.
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In March 1984, the CIA’s annual intelligence estimate on Soviet forces described how Moscow was struggling to improve air defenses, including the effort to build improved “data links” between the new Soviet fighter jets, radars, surface-to-air missiles, and airborne warning and control planes.
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The conclusions in all these reports came in part from thousands of pages of secret Soviet documents delivered by Tolkachev to the CIA.

By 1985, the CIA had a precise fix on Soviet capabilities for airborne radar. A 1985 report mentioned five major areas in which the Soviets were taking action “to enhance their air defense capabilities.” Every one of them had been compromised by Tolkachev on his rolls of film and his notes, including the airborne warning and control plane and look-down, shoot-down radar.
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Separate from the finished intelligence, Tolkachev’s material was also fed directly into U.S. military research and development programs. Often, Tolkachev’s information would be most helpful to the technical wizards who were building black boxes and other advanced technology to defeat Soviet radars and avionics. One such project was a radar jammer. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force were collaborating on a jammer for their latest fighter planes. The project was in its early stages when Tolkachev reported on Soviet research into pulse-Doppler radar. For many years, the Soviets had lagged behind the West in the development of pulse-Doppler, which allows radar to effectively look down at very high speeds and discriminate a moving target against the ground clutter of the earth. The U.S. radar jammer, as originally planned, lacked a way to counter a pulse-Doppler radar. After a study by the U.S. Defense Science Board in 1980, the jammer design was modified to include a beam that would confuse pulse-Doppler radars, like the
zaslon
. This change was made precisely at the time that Tolkachev was providing information about Soviet radars. The Airborne Self-Protection Jammer was an ambitious project, designed to deceive enemy radar to think a plane was at a different location. It might have been an important advantage, had the Cold War ever become hot.
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Tolkachev delivered to the United States a library of top secret documents about the design and capability of radars deployed on Soviet fighters and interceptors, including the MiG-23 fighter, the MiG-25 high-altitude interceptor, the MiG-31 interceptor, and the MiG-29 and Su-27 multi-role fighters. In particular, Tolkachev compromised several versions of the
sapfir
radar and the
zaslon
radar. Tolkachev also carted away Soviet secrets on surface-to-air missiles and the sensitive Soviet project called
shtora
, or “window blind,” which was designed to conceal surface-to-air missiles from the radars of target aircraft.

In another intelligence windfall, Tolkachev was the first to alert the United States that the Soviet Union was starting to develop an advanced airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, a flying radar station. Once Tolkachev pointed it out, U.S. spy satellites confirmed it. The twenty-ton radar, named
shmel
, or “bumblebee,” would be carried on a modified Ilyushin Il-76 military transport jet, with a flying disk for the radar dome, not unlike the advanced U.S. E-3 Sentry system, based on a modified Boeing 707, which was already flying. The new AWACS would be critical to Soviet efforts to deal with the low-altitude gap and the lack of look-down radar capability. A flying radar would provide much greater detection of threats and deliver data and instructions to airborne pilots.
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The Tolkachev documents showed the
shmel
would have look-down capability. The radar could potentially track fifty or more targets simultaneously over land.
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Soviet national air defenses were stitched together from thousands of separate units. There were 1,250 ground-based radars, about 25 percent of them supporting ground control centers to direct pilots to their targets; about 1,000 surface-to-air complexes and 12,800 surface-to-air missile launchers; and 3,250 fighters capable of air intercept missions at some ninety airfields.
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For the system to be effective, they would all have to be knitted together—and work. With a strong ethos of centralization, the Soviet Union had in the past relied on ground-controlled intercept, meaning that controllers in radar stations on the ground would give directions to fighters and interceptors—where to fly, when to shoot. Soviet pilots had little autonomy. This was slow and clumsy. Most of the radar operators on the ground couldn’t see beyond their own unit’s coverage. A modernized Soviet AWACS could change all that. Thanks to Tolkachev, the United States had a front-row seat to Soviet AWACS technology. A CIA memo written in 1981 noted that the Soviet AWACS was “still in the early stages of field testing” but said the radar “has detected targets over land as low as 300 meters,” or 984 feet. That would help, but not entirely close the low-altitude radar gap. The U.S. bombers were planning to fly even lower, at 800 feet altitude or less, and cruise missiles would sneak in at just 50 feet above the ground. Moreover, the Soviets knew, and feared, that the cruise missiles were relatively inexpensive and thus the United States could send swarms of them racing to targets, undetected.
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By September 1981, a secret twenty-three-page U.S. defense intelligence estimate on the Soviet AWACS had been prepared. The estimate had the express purpose of helping create countermeasures to the Soviet aircraft and noted that there would be gaps in the Soviet AWACS coverage—gaps that Western planes could sneak through—and that Moscow still faced serious difficulties in spotting cruise missiles and future U.S. stealth bombers.
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The Tolkachev documents also revealed that the MiG-31 fighter, equipped with the
zaslon
radar, carried an air-to-air data link that would allow it to function as a mini-AWACS on its own, sharing radar information with other fighters. Previous attempts to break such a data link and “read” it had proven almost impossible for the United States. But now, with Tolkachev’s documents identifying what each bit of information meant, the link could be cracked open, an incredible breakthrough. The United States could intercept Soviet AWACS signals, to detect—and deceive—the pilots who depended on them.
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The United States was reading the enemy’s mail, in real time.

Two retired CIA officers, each with decades of experience in the clandestine service, generously contributed time and effort to this project. Burton Gerber, who served as both chief of the Moscow station and Soviet division chief, devoted hours to research into the original cables, with the agency’s approval and clearance of the materials before release to me. He provided invaluable guidance and context for the Tolkachev story. Barry Royden, who authored an internal CIA monograph on the operation in the 1990s, was an early enthusiast for the book and a source of great insight. Both helped to navigate the declassification process and demystify the world of espionage.

Ron, the chief of the CE division at the CIA when the project began, provided critical support for declassification of the operational files. I also benefited from the recollections of David Forden, Robert Fulton, Sandra Grimes, Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, Thomas Mills, Robert Morris, James Olson, Marti Peterson, William Plunkert, David Rolph, Michael Sellers, Haviland Smith, and Robert Wallace. Catherine Guilsher generously provided recollections of John’s life and times. Karin Hathaway graciously helped with memories of Gus. John Ehrman provided an important link to the agency. My thanks also to several retired intelligence officers who agreed to share their knowledge and recollections without being identified.

In Moscow, I was assisted by Anna Masterova, who skillfully sifted archives, conducted interviews, and translated. I also am grateful to Irina Ostrovskaya of Memorial International for archival records on the repression of the Kuzmin family. Volodya Alexandrov and Sergei Belyakov were, as always, selfless and ready to help at every turn. Masha Lipman has been a peerless source of wisdom and insight about Russia for two decades, and provided perceptive and detailed comments on the draft manuscript.

Maryanne Warrick transcribed interviews and carried out research assignments, and I am grateful for her precision and tireless efforts. Charissa Ford and Julie Tate also contributed research.

At the
Washington Post
, I was fortunate to be part of a golden age of journalism built by Don Graham and Katharine Graham, and I am grateful to the executive editors Benjamin C. Bradlee and Leonard Downie for giving me the opportunity to contribute to it. I am particularly thankful for years of advice and support from Philip Bennett, a colleague and friend with whom I shared some of the best years in the newsroom and who gave me an important critique of the manuscript. Robert Kaiser has been a model and mentor, and Joby Warrick a valued friend and adviser. Peter Finn and Michael Birnbaum, talented Moscow bureau chiefs, offered their cooperation and help.

I am indebted to H. Keith Melton for sharing images from his collection and to Kathy Krantz Fieramosca for permission to reproduce her painting of Adolf Tolkachev. I wish to thank Jack F. Matlock, Dick Combs, and James Schumaker for recollections of the 1977 fire at the Moscow embassy. For insights about radar and air defenses, I am grateful to David Kenneth Ellis, William Andrews, Robin Lee, and Larry Pitts. I also received valuable advice and help from Robert Berls, Benjamin Weiser, Fritz Ermarth, Charles Battaglia, Jerrold Schecter, Robert Monroe, Peter Earnest, George Little, Louis Denes, Matthew Aid, Joshua Pollack, and Jason Saltoun-Ebin. Cathy Cox of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base fulfilled requests professionally and promptly. I am grateful for access to the collections of the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; the U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Program, Annapolis, Maryland; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California; and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, Moscow.

Glenn Frankel has been a mentor on writing for years and once again gave me perceptive and valuable comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to Svetlana Savranskaya for comments on a draft and sharing her knowledge about how to pry Cold War secrets out of the world’s archives.

For the second time in a decade, the wise and patient editing of Kris Puopolo steered me from a hazy vision and a box full of loose documents to a finished narrative, and I am deeply appreciative. My thanks, too, to Bill Thomas for believing this book would be worthy of Doubleday. I thank Daniel Meyer for keeping the project on track. I’m grateful to Esther Newberg for being an extraordinary agent. Her first phone call upon reading the draft manuscript, full of enthusiasm, was a moment to cherish.

My deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Carole, who lovingly guided our own Moscow station, with our sons, Daniel and Benjamin, when I was a correspondent for the
Washington Post
in the late 1990s. She offered advice and insight at every stage of this project. More importantly, she endured the disruptions and unpredictable twists and turns that come with a life in journalism but never lost a conviction that discovering the world was a voyage worth taking. For as long as I can recall, a small scrap of paper has been fastened to our refrigerator door with a proverb from Saint Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.” With her steadfast support and participation, the world is, once again, a book.