True Soviet spy tale makes for a thrilling read
Technology has revolutionized the art of intelligence, as satellites hundreds of miles above the planet take photos that lay out a target’s defenses and vulnerabilities. It has made monitoring arms control agreements and troop movements detailed to a degree once considered impossible.
Those advances most likely will never replace human intelligence — the on-theground spies who conduct much of the espionage that does more than provide visual images. The vagaries of running human operatives, often in difficult places, make reading David Hoffman’s The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal gripping and nerve-wracking.
Hoffman’s billion-dollar spy is Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet radar engineer who grew weary of his regime’s failed promises and propaganda and became the first Soviet citizen actively working as a spy for the United States inside his country in the late 1970s.
At first, Hoffman writes, CIA agents working in Moscow thought Tolkachev was too good to be true. They could not believe that this man stuffing notes through U.S. operatives’ car windows was for real. Neither could their superiors in Washington, who feared Tolkachev was a KGB plant who would expose the agents who talked to him.
Tolkachev’s specialty was radar and how the Soviets were developing a system, similar to that used in U.S. AWACS planes, that would look down from high altitudes and see aircraft and other threats below. He brazenly took documents from work and copied them at home, and later used a CIA-supplied camera to photograph them, often providing dozens of rolls of film to U.S. agents.
The Air Force estimated Tolkachev provided $2 billion worth of intelligence in 1980s dollars.
The benefits came at a considerable human cost. Tolkachev constantly worried that he would be discovered. He asked the CIA to give him a suicide pill he could take if he was captured and imprisoned.
Hoffman, a veteran journalist, knows the intelligence world well and has expertly used recently declassified documents to tell this unsettling and suspenseful story.
It is an old cliché that any true story about espionage resembles the best of John le Carré’s fiction. That’s especially true here. The Billion Dollar Spy is worth the clenched jaw and upset stomach it creates.