Here is what we do or like to do:
And what follows below is how it is done by a superpower:
He was reportedly the most
successful and valued agent/asset the United States had run inside the Soviet
Union in two decades. His documents and drawings had unlocked the secrets of several
of the USSR’s radars and guided-weapons R & D years into the future. He had
even smuggled circuit-boards and blueprints out of the R & D laboratories
where he was working. His espionage thus put the US in a position to dominate
the skies over hostile airspace and confirmed the vulnerability of USSR-developed
air-defence networks. The agent was Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer and specialist
in airborne radars who worked deep inside the Soviet military-industrial
complex. Over a six-year perriod, Tolkachev met with his CIA handlers 21 times
on the streets of Moscow. Tolkachev’s story has now been detailed in 944 pages
of previously secret CIA cables about the operation that was declassified
without condition for the forthcoming book, ‘The Billion Dollar Spy’. The CIA did not
review the book before publication. The documents and interviews with the participants
offer a remarkably detailed picture of how military-industrial espionage was conducted
in the USSR during some of the most tense years of the Cold War. Tolkachev was
driven by a desire to avenge history. His wife’s mother was executed and her
father sent to forced-labour camps during Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s.
He also described himself as disillusioned with communism and “a dissident at
heart”. He wanted to strike back at the USSR, and did so by betraying its military
secrets to the US.
His CIA case officers often
observed that he seemed determined to cause the maximum damage possible to the
Soviet Union, despite the risks. The punishment for treason was execution.
Tolkachev did not want to die at the hands of the KGB. Therefore, he asked for
and got a suicide pill from the CIA he could use if caught. The US Air Force
estimated at one point in the operation that Tolkachev’s espionage had saved
the United States $2 billion in weapons R & D. Tolkachev used to smuggle
most of the secret documents out of his office during lunch-hour hidden in his
overcoat, and photographed them using a Pentax 35mm camera clamped to a chair
in his apartment. In return, Tolkachev asked the CIA for money, mostly as a
sign of respect. There wasn’t much to buy in shortage-plagued Moscow in those
days. He also wanted albums of Western music—the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Uriah
Heep and others—for his teenage son. Tolkachev thus became one of the CIA’s
most productive agents of the Cold War.
Documentation supplied by Tolkachev by late 1983 had
included: complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of Phazatron NIIR’s 385kg N-019
Rubin RPLK-29/Sapfir-29 pulse-Doppler radar with twist-cassegrain antenna and its successor, the NO19MP
Topaz—both meant for the MiG-29B-12 and MiG-29B-13; complete sets of
engineering and technical data-packages of JSC V
Tikhomirov
Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design’s N-001 Myech/RPLK-27 X-band pulse-Doppler radar
with twist-cassegrain antenna for the Su-27SK; complete sets of engineering and
technical data-packages of the Zaslon RP-31/N-007
PESA radar on-board the MiG-31; complete
sets of engineering and technical data-packages of
the Shmel 3-D radar for the Beriev A-50 AEW & CS from NPO Vega; and complete sets of
engineering and technical data-packages of both 2K12
Kub MR-SAM family
and the Buk-М1 MR-SAM.
