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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now, Gordon, you have been a NordVPN user for over a year now. And why in the world do you like them so much?
- [00:13]
Gordon Carrera
So many reasons, David. But one feature in particular that I love is that with just one subscription, you can keep multiple devices safe up to 10 at once with the NordVPN app. So I've got a lot of phones and laptops around the house which I've used over the years in various places. And to keep them all safe and secure, I do use that NordVPN.
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David McCloskey
You can also protect unlimited devices on your router by using NordVPN, which means that it is perfect for keeping your family safe online when they're using social media, email, banking online, or really anything for that matter.
- [00:48]
Gordon Carrera
If you want to ensure that you're safe online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to nordvpn.com restisclassified and and when you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your subscription plan. And there's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box.
- [01:11]
David McCloskey
Exclusively on AMC and amc. There's a black cloud that hangs over our family. Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches Return.
- [01:19]
Alexandra Daddario
Slasher's out there hunting Mayfair women.
- [01:22]
Gordon Carrera
You're gonna have a battle on your hands.
- [01:24]
David McCloskey
Starring Alexandra Daddario. I'm gonna take care of it. Of him.
- [01:29]
Alexandra Daddario
Surrender to the D. It's not a sin to kill the devil. Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches Sundays Exclusively on AMC and amc.
- [01:42]
David McCloskey
This episode is brought to you by Paramount. Death is just the beginning. In the new season of the Paramount original series, School Spirits, Maddie is still trapped in the afterlife. Now she must work together with her friends in the spirit and living worlds to find a way back before it's too late.
- [02:00]
Gordon Carrera
Stream the new season of school spirits.
- [02:02]
David McCloskey
January 30, exclusively on Paramount. Head to paramountplus.com to get started.
- [02:13]
Gordon Carrera
Hello, everyone. Gordon here. Now, just before we get to the latest episode of the Rest is Classified, we have got some exciting news to share with you now, David. If I'm not mistaken, something significant is coming down the line.
- [02:27]
David McCloskey
That's right, Gordon. So my latest book, The Seventh Floor, is coming out in the UK on Thursday, 30 January, which is wonderfully, tremendously exciting news. It is a book about a mole operating in the highest reaches of Langley on the seventh floor, which is the executive suite where the CIA director and all of his or her minions have their offices. Uh, it's a story about, you know, a, a Russian mole inside CIA and a CIA officer's attempt to root them out. It's full of kind of modern tradecraft and settled right in the middle of the present day spy war between Washington and Moscow. And Gordon, it features one of your favorite topics. Crazy Russian Illegals up to no Good.
- [03:14]
Gordon Carrera
Moles, Minions and Russian Illegals. It sounds great and I've read it and it is great. And even more excitingly, there's going to be the chance to see both of in person as we're going to be doing an event also in London at the end of the month, aren't we, David?
- [03:30]
David McCloskey
That's right. So on the 28th of January at Waterstones Trafalgar Square. And by the way, there's a link for tickets to this event in the episode description box. But on 28 January at Waterstones Trafalgar Square in London, Gordon and I are going to talk about the seventh floor. We're going to talk about the show, the Rest Is Classified and we're going to probably reveal some of our favorite spy secrets along the way. I'll also mention that Waterstones has signed editions of the book if anyone wants to pick those up in advance.
- [04:00]
Gordon Carrera
Yep. So the location and the time is not classified. In fact, you can find it in the show.
- [04:05]
David McCloskey
We've just declassified it.
- [04:06]
Gordon Carrera
We've declassified it. It's in the show. Notes do come along if you can. But with that, enjoy the episod. Some inner worm started to torment me. Something has to be done. I started to write short leaflets that I planned to mail out. But later, having thought it out properly, I understood this was a useless undertaking. To establish contact with dissident circles which have contact with foreign journalists seemed senseless to me due to the nature of my work. I have top secret clearance based on the slightest suspicion I would be totally isolated or liquidated. Thus was born my plan of action to which I have resorted. That is Adolf Tolkachev writing to his CIA handlers describing how he chose to become a spy and his drive to destroy the Soviet Union from within. Welcome to the Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon CARRERA.
- [05:14]
David McCloskey
I'm David McCloskey and this is the story, Gordon, as you mentioned, of Adolf Tolkachev, who I think we could say might have been or probably was the most valuable CIA spy in Moscow during the Cold War.
- [05:29]
Gordon Carrera
Or Moscow, I should say Moscow, Moscow rather than Moscow. But anyway, keep going.
- [05:34]
David McCloskey
I've been told it's more of an Acton accent. Is that right, Gordon?
- [05:37]
Gordon Carrera
No, just keep going. Sorry to interrupt.
- [05:40]
David McCloskey
So he's the most valuable spy in Moscow in the 1980s. He's an expert on Soviet radar whose intelligence was valued, and this is insane, valued by the US government at around $2 billion. So he is the Billion Dollar Spy, which is also the title of an exceptional work on Tolkachev by a man named David Hoffman. And we'll be drawing extensively on that book as we tell this story. But this, Gordon, I think, is a really the height of the Cold War, this battle between the CIA and the kgb, this kind of spy war that's going on at the absolute apex of the Cold War in the middle of the 1980s. And it is, Gordon, I think, to kind of get the Zeitgeist in 1984. It is the Hunt for Red October, which is the film adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel by the same name, is coming out. And it comes out right as the CIA is in the middle of running Adolf Tolkachev as a spy. And in that film, as in the book, you know, we have these superpowers sort of competing for military primacy. There is a battle over the technology that is going to provide an advantage in the Cold War. And of course, in Red October, we have Captain Marco Ramius, who's sort of wonderfully played by Sean Connery, although with.
- [07:05]
Gordon Carrera
A slightly dodgy accent, I should say, in that film.
- [07:08]
David McCloskey
Was the Hunt for Red October. Did that do well in the UK? Go ahead. Did that sort of impact the 80s in the UK as it did here?
- [07:16]
Gordon Carrera
I think he didn't quite play it with the Russian accent, but he didn't.
- [07:20]
David McCloskey
Have the accent that you did when you were reading that Toltech quote.
- [07:22]
Gordon Carrera
Thank you. I didn't try.
- [07:23]
David McCloskey
That's a proper Moscow accent. And of course, in the novel Hunt for Red October, as in the movie, we have the Soviets have this, what's called a Caterpillar drive on their subs that make them very quiet and undetectable by US sonar. And so we have this sort of battle over technology. And Sean Connery is this disillusioned Soviet captain whose wife has died at the hands of an incompetent doctor. And he's the sort of defector from within on the Soviet system, and he's trying to bring this technology to the United States so the United States can have it and give Washington an advantage in the Cold War. And what I think is incredible about the Tolkachev story is that we have, I think in the person of Adolf Tolkachev, someone who's actually quite similar to Marco Ramius, the Sean Connery character, in that he, Tolkachev is a member of the Soviet elite. He is a radar engineer and technician and designer who is working on cutting edge Soviet aviation technology. And he, like Connery, has this burning desire to, to wreck the Soviet Union from within.
- [08:34]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and I think what also is interesting about this is it does have, even though it's a story of Cold War espionage, it's still got a real contemporary relevance because I mean, one of the things that we've heard the CIA and MI6 directors saying recently is that they're open for business from disillusioned officials in Moscow who want to spy for Western intelligence. They've been putting out, you know, videos on telegram, on, on social media, providing instructions of how, if you like, to contact the CIA and to provide intelligence. So this story though gives a sense, I think, of just how hard it is to run an agent in Moscow under the eyes of, of Russian intelligence and the Russian security services, then the kgb, now the FSB and just the challenges involved in that. But the centrality and the importance of those human sources which are at the heart of this business.
- [09:25]
David McCloskey
Well, and I think this is where again so much of the detail that we're going to talk about here, it comes from that wonderful book by David Hoffman, the Billion Dollar Spy, because he gets into, by virtue of having access to much of the cable traffic from inside CIA about this case, he gets into the nitty gritty kind of the details of very specifically, how do you run an asset in Moscow? Right? How, how do you communicate, how do you pass information, how do you pass goods? Where do people store their spy gear? How do you take photographs? I mean, this is one of those cases where we really have a light shone on the practical realities of running a spy in Moscow. Now of course this is a case from the 80s, the tradecraft has changed, but a lot of the fundamentals around communication and around, as we'll see, how do you detect surveillance? There's been adaptations and evolutions, but a lot of the basic principles are still the same. And so I think listeners will get a real picture here of just how kind of end to end the CIA runs and recruits a human asset in Russia. Now Adolf Tokachev, the man who will become the billion dollar spy, he literally drops into CIA's lap. And I think this is something also that listeners may be a little surprised at, which is at the end of the day, there are a very, very small number of human assets that really pay all the bills at CIA or probably any other intelligence service. You'd be surprised at just how few of them there are and how the ones that are really valuable are essentially covering the budget for the entire agency in terms of their. In terms of their value. And interestingly, those types of assets almost always volunteer. They are very rarely sort of recruited over this kind of long, painstaking process of trying to convince them. They tend to drop in our laps to some degree. And that is the case with Adolf Tolkachev. Now, what happens here is it is January of 1977 in Moscow. The best time of year to visit Moscow, I'm told, is in January. It is very cold. The CIA's station chief in Moscow is filling his car up with gas at kind of one of these stations that are reserved for, you know, foreign diplomats and officials. And a mystery man, who's Adolf Tolkachev, walks up and asks if the chief of station is American. Now, he can tell from the diplomatic plates that the man is American, but he wants to confirm. And the man who walks up, this guy Tolkachev, he's got brown hair, he's got a crook in his nose from a kind of boyhood hockey accident. He's got a very broad forehead. And he kind of reminds me, and I don't know, Gordon, if this will resonate with our British listeners, he reminds me a little bit of Herman Munster from the Munsters. He's got very distinctive features and a very big forehead.
- [12:26]
Gordon Carrera
I have to say, when I looked at pictures of him, and people can look those up if they want to see him, he doesn't look like your kind of top research scientist to me. He doesn't look like the nerdy research scientist. He's got that kind of broken nose. He looks more like a boxer. He looks a lot more like the kind of the thug, the kind of hired help you'd expect working for the kind of KGB or something like that in their stereotype, rather than, if you like, this quite intense and clearly very clever engineer.
- [12:50]
David McCloskey
That is. Right. He's got a tough look to him. And, you know, he is an active outdoorsman. Loves fishing, loves hunting, loves being out at his Dodge in the countryside. You know, he runs in the mornings. He likes to ski. He's. He's an outdoors guy. He's an active guy. And, you know, at this point, though, what's interesting, and we'll come to this later on, is the agency doesn't know who he is, and they have absolutely no idea why in the world he is contacting the chief of station. And we'll get to that. So Tolkachev later is going to say, and this comes from the CIA has done some unclassified write ups on Tolkachev. Tolkachev later notes that he had decided that the driver of the car he chose to approach had to be an American and not a Russian chauffeur due to his quote, bright and beggarly clothing, trousers which had never seen an iron. No Russian chauffeur of a diplomatic vehicle would ever dress like that. So in other words, the chief of station was dressed so low rent that Tolkachev figured he could not be driving a well placed Russian around. So Tolkachev puts a piece of paper in the front seat and walks away. CIA again, doesn't know his name, doesn't know anything about him. And later in the station, the chief of station reads a note. Tolkachev basically, quite vaguely says, I want to discuss matters on a strictly confidential basis with an appropriate American official. And Tolkachev then suggests a discreet meeting at a given time and place in the car of an American official at like a metro station entrance.
- [14:21]
Gordon Carrera
I mean even that seems quite risky to me. But he's clearly thought about it, Tolkachev, and he's been planning this and has worked out that might be a secure way of meeting someone because there still seems even risk to that. Putting a note in an American's car or suggesting meeting in their car.
- [14:36]
David McCloskey
I think it is worth noting just how high risk these seemingly sort of innocuous things are. I mean, talking to an American, putting a note in the car, I mean these are the kind of things that could ruin his entire life if he's spotted and if the KGB runs it down. I mean, at this time, Gordon, I mean the KGB is maybe like a million strong. The vast majority of their sort of human capital of the KGB are in the second Chief Directorate, which is internal security watching Russians in Russia. So Tolkachev has a lot of things to worry about, but he's an engineer at heart, he's very precise and he's got, you know, he's got sketches of the exact locations and where the car should be parked. He's clearly thought this through and you would expect that, hey, a Russian has dropped into our lap, right? CIA would be chomping at the bit to talk to this guy. Well, the CIA is quite apprehensive. Maybe that sounds abnormal, but it's actually quite common in this period for notes to get dumped into Americans cars so that a note being dropped in the Chief of Station's window is not so crazy. It happened a lot in the summertime. Russians trying to contact Americans and also the kgb. Gordon, as you all know, has a long track record of entrapping Americans. The idea here being the KGB gets a CIA officer or even a diplomat, lures them into meeting with a Russian and then expels them. And it creates massive sort of problems in the pipeline to staff Moscow, Station and the embassy. If the KGB is booting people out.
- [16:11]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's called a dangle, isn't it? And you dangle someone who's under your control as the KGB to the CIA and say you pretend he wants to spy for them and it allows you to identify all the CIA officers. That's something both sides do to each other. So there's a natural caution about a note being passed rather than thinking, oh great, here's a potential spy for us.
- [16:29]
David McCloskey
Exactly. And so there's also some stuff going on in the high level kind of bilateral relationship. This is January of 77. So the Carter administration is taking power in Washington. The incoming Secretary of State is coming to Moscow to kind of lay the basis for bilateral relationships between the U.S. and the Russians in the new administration. And so D.C. langley, they don't want anything on the streets of Moscow to kind of complicate that, so they ignore Adolf Tolkachev. Now, Tolkachev is absolutely relentless, which is thematic in his character. He tries two more times. In February of 1977, he knocks on the window of the Chief of Station's car. He drops papers inside. He kind of, he starts to give. I think Tolkachev is realizing that the CIA needs a little bit more from him. And so he gives in one of these notes a bit of biographical detail that he works for what he calls a closed enterprise, which is basically a secret facility for defense work. And, you know, again, the CIA still doesn't bite. Now there's a fourth try. In May of 1977, Tolkachev had been kind of hiding in a phone booth, tries to hand off a package to the Chief of station, but the chief doesn't roll down the window, drives off. CIA headquarters at Langley has instructed the Chief to ignore Tolkachev. And again, you mentioned, you know, sort of dangles and expulsions on either side. A Soviet diplomat has just been expelled from New York. And CIA thinks again, the KGB is dangling someone at us to kind of retaliate in Moscow. So let's just back off this guy. So we've had four tries in the span of about four or five months. And every time he's gotten the cold shoulder from CIA, which must be bizarre, mustn't it?
- [18:16]
Gordon Carrera
You think, I'm trying to spy for you. Let me give you some top secret information. And no one seems to want to listen to him. But what's interesting is he doesn't give up, which suggests a kind of drive, and we'll get to his motivations later. But it does suggest a really kind of intense desire to do this and to take more and more risks.
- [18:35]
David McCloskey
Absolutely. And I think, you know, I've wondered about this as we, you know, preparing the story. Is Tolkachev confused by this response? Is he perplexed? I would imagine to some degree he is. But he's also intimately aware of how his own system functions. Right. He is not kind of a country bumpkin who has no concept of sort of, you know, how Soviet power functions. Right. He understands, I think, the kgb, he understands the risks in the system, and he probably understands the sort of reluctance on the part of CIA to just take the bait, as it were. And so I think he probably has some appreciation for the caution that the CIA is going to show. And I think, frankly, as we'll get further into the story, I think it probably informs some measure of the respect he has for the cautious way that CIA will eventually run the case. Now, why all this apprehension, though? Like, I mean, there's got to be something else going on. Well, another bit of this story is that 1977 has been shaping up to be a very, very bad year in Moscow Station. So that year, the CIA loses a prized asset in Moscow. A Foreign Ministry official who had been recruited in Colombia and who had come back into Russia was spying for CIA. There's probably a whole separate pod, Gordon, that we could do on this case because it's absolutely incredible. But, so the CIA has lost an asset in Moscow, and this guy had actually been given a suicide pill that they'd been snuggled into a pen when caught, he asked for the pen to write his confession, bites into it, dies. So CIA has lost this asset in dramatic fashion. CIA doesn't know at this point how this asset had been blown. In September, the CIA is going to lose another source. And then on top of all of that, there's a new CIA director in town, of course, with the Carter administration coming in, a man who's very suspicious, I think you could say Gordon of CIA. His name's Admiral Stansfield Turner. He's a Navy man. He's a four Star admiral had been commander in chief of Allied forces in Southern Europe. And he is, I think, deeply skeptical of the value of human intelligence. You know, there's these stories of him coming in and kind of seeing some of the first images being beamed down from spy satellites up to that point had actually been film that had been sort of floated down, picked up by planes to get developed. You know, it took a while. Now you're literally having the images kind of beam down. Stansfield Turner calls it TV in space. And there's kind of this massive, I think, cultural and philosophical chasm between Turner and the CIA's Directorate of Operations. And Turner also has really kind of roughed up CIA in his first year in office.
- [21:31]
Gordon Carrera
And so with that context in mind, Tolkachev is trying and he's pushing against the door, which seems pretty firmly closed. So he realizes he's got to give them something more, doesn't he, to actually convince CIA that he is the real deal and not some kind of dangle and that he's worth, I guess, taking.
- [21:47]
David McCloskey
A risk in that context. You know, Tokalov doesn't know any of this, but he's kind of asking the CIA officers in Moscow to take a pretty big risk in their system. Because also, I mean, the other bit of context here we should add on 1977 is that there's a fire at the embassy in Moscow, the U.S. embassy. And no one quite knows at the time how it was started, but it's believed that the Soviets send KGB firemen up to try to put it out. And the chief of station literally kind of stands in the door to prevent these KGB officers from going into Moscow station. So it kind of the CIA is adding all of this stuff up and saying, okay, do we have a mole? Are the Soviets, you know, wise to some of our tradecraft in Moscow? Is the KGB reading our comms? And all of this culminates at the end of the year with Stansfield Turner, the CIA director, essentially ordering a freeze in clandestine operations in Moscow until they can guarantee no more compromises, which, of course to these, you know, do Directorate of Operations officers. Sounds insane, but they've got this diktat from the CIA's seventh floor that basically says no operations, just kind of stand down. So Tolkachev is really asking a lot of these Moscow Station officers who I think probably would have behaved more aggressively on the case if given the chance. They're being asked to sort of, you know, hold back and kind of let the Tolkachev thing play out without doing much.
- [23:18]
Gordon Carrera
Okay, David. So with that freeze in place from Langley, from the US side on carrying out operations in Moscow, and Tolkachev desperate to actually meet with the CIA and give them intelligence. Let's take a break and see how they finally get in contact when we come back. This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now, David, what do you find useful about Nord?
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [24:19]
David McCloskey
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Alexandra Daddario
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David McCloskey
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- [25:08]
David McCloskey
Well, welcome back. It is December of 1977. It has been almost a year since Adolf Tolkachev first tried to make contact with CIA and he has still not had a single meeting other than these sort of bumps with CIA officers on the streets of Moscow. And Tolkachev, as we had said, is a relentless character and he tries again even in the middle of this stand down in Moscow Station, which Gorci doesn't know about, but he is going to push through. And what Tolkachev does in December of 77 is he essentially replays the initial drop that he had made on the chief of Station back in January. He goes to a gas station again, one frequented by foreign diplomats. Finds an American diplomatic car. This time it's not the chief of Station, it's the major domo of Spasibo House, which is where the US Ambassador lives in Moscow. And a major domo. Gordon, is that a Downton Abbey reference? I think I've, I've. I think I've seen that kind of person sort of downstairs. Is that right?
- [26:15]
Gordon Carrera
So they, they run the house. Is that what they say? He runs the house? Yeah. The house being the U.S. the U.S. ambassador's residence.
- [26:21]
David McCloskey
Not Downton Abbey. Not Downton Abbey, yes.
- [26:23]
Gordon Carrera
Okay, got it.
- [26:24]
David McCloskey
And the major domo takes the information into the embassy, gives it to the ambassador, it sort of works its way through the embassy system, gets to the CIA, and what Tolkachev has provided is two typewritten pages of intelligence about Soviet military radars. And this is coming on the heels of a Soviet MiG pilot who had actually defected to Japan with the aircraft. And Tolkachev says that that MIG 25, that the technicians inside the Soviet system after the defection are now furiously reworking the radar configuration. And Tolkachev also says that he has the schematics for what's called a look down, shoot down radar ldsd, which is not a psychedelic drug, but is in fact a really interesting piece of military intelligence that the CIA and the Pentagon, you know, sort of official Washington would be really keen to know. And Gordon, it's basically a capability that would allow Soviet planes at very high altitude to spot planes or missiles flying below. And that is, I mean, it sounds a little bit, I guess, technical, but basically what it is, is, is it. It would close what the Americans see as kind of a key gap in Soviet coverage, which is that during, I guess, a US sort of missile bomb strike, nuclear strike, whatever, the US could fly missiles or bombers at low altitudes and they would be invisible to Soviet radar. So the Soviets are sort of working to close this gap and Tolkachev is sort of dangling in front of CIA that he might have intelligence on specifically how they're trying to close that gap.
- [28:06]
Gordon Carrera
So we don't need to get too deep into the technicals of it, but it's clearly in the world of kind of Cold War technology. As you were saying the start with Humpba Red October. This is a kind of key capability which the Soviets developing, which the US wants to know about. So Tolkachev has given them something which I guess he knows will be of great interest to the CIA and to Washington. And that's what's got him over the line. Or what gets him over the line, isn't it? Is the clear proof that he's, he's got something of value to them rather than just being a dangle or someone trying to offer Them low grade stuff.
- [28:36]
David McCloskey
And this is where you do start to see the tenor of the case flipping and kind of, you know, the CIA starts to perk up, but Tolkachev hasn't really given them schematics or specs yet. He's just said, I have these. And he's been able to describe it in kind of enough detail to sound believable. And I think it's sort of a fascinating window into just how there's kind of this push and pull between Moscow Station and then these more risk averse forces at CIA headquarters because there's a back and forth in the cable traffic over the next few weeks, which again the Hoffman book Billion Dollar Spy kind of wonderfully lays out, which is that Moscow Station is essentially saying, let us do something and meet with this guy, try to get in touch with him. And there's a memo that basically says, okay, there's two options, which I love because frankly it defies the famous advice from Henry Kissinger, I believe that you should always have three options, an A B and a C. And sort of the middle ground is the one you want the policymaker to choose. But there's only two in this case. Option B is let's go ahead and meet with him. And what do you think option A is, Gordon? What's your guess on, on what the proposal is there?
- [29:47]
Gordon Carrera
Do nothing, do nothing too.
- [29:50]
David McCloskey
It's too risky. It could lead to another expulsion, prolong the stand down the CIA. There's sort of this hand wringing of, you know, tolkiev might have initially been sort of genuine, but now he's being monitored by the KGB and we're being set up. And you know, this is another bit of it which we alluded to earlier is like the CIA station in Moscow is not massive. The officers there are really valuable. Two case officers had been sent home the previous year. And if, you know, the KGB burns one of us meeting with this guy, we lose another. And so again the answer is do nothing. And Tolkachev comes back. Oh, and interestingly, sort of from a bureaucratic perspective, because I love these Tolkachev. He's not a recruited asset yet by any means, but the CIA will still give developmentals a kind of a kryptonym. And so he is encrypted as CK Sphere. You'll remember, Gordon, from our wonderful journeys through coup attempts in Iran, that in the 50s, the sort of digraph, those first two letters of the case for AJAX or TPAJAX here, CK denotes a Soviet division case. And Sphere is kind of Tolkachev's kryptonym. So he'll be known and kind of talked about inside Station, inside Langley as sphere.
- [31:07]
Gordon Carrera
But they've given him the kryptonym. But they're still not. He's still banging his head against the wall, almost literally. And he doesn't give up.
- [31:14]
David McCloskey
He does not give up. It is February of 1978. He has been at this for over a year. Tolkachev shoves another note through another car window. And in it this time he includes. And this is where I think Tolkachev is. He's many things. He's highly creative. And he includes in it his phone number. He excludes the last two digits. He says, I'll be on a certain street corner. And he's got a little diagram of where he'll be holding a plywood board with the last two numbers on a particular date. And so he's giving the CIA a way to contact him again.
- [31:50]
Gordon Carrera
Can I just say that someone standing up with a plywood board with two numbers on it would seem to me to be the most suspicious thing in Moscow. And yet this is his kind of clever way of not giving, you know, giving the last two digits of his phone number to them. I mean, it works. So I guess, you know, I guess he knows what he's doing. But it's just interesting how people come up with these slightly, what appear to be crazy ideas.
- [32:11]
David McCloskey
Yeah, I suppose you're right. If I reflect on if I were standing on a street corner with numbers on a plywood board, it might draw more attention rather than less. I suppose it depends on how, how big the board is, how big the numbers are. And this is another, I think, fascinating window into the bureaucratic machinery that propels these kind of cases. Because all along, you know, CI headquarters has been saying, brush him off, don't do anything. There's a stand down. And finally, what happens at around the time that Tolkachev has given his instructions about the plywood board is that the Pentagon has kind of been looking through some of the initial stuff from Tolkachev and they express interest. There's a memo that gets sent from the Pentagon to CIA where the Pentagon expresses an interest in intelligence on Soviet radars. And this starts to tip the balance. And it's a very common, I think, feature of how CIA sort of prioritizes and thinks about what kind of operations it is going to do or approve is the CIA is very customer driven. And so if an outside agency, particularly a senior customer at Pentagon or at the White House or the State Department says, I really want something on X that starts to give CIA collectors out in the field air cover to go and do these things, right, to produce that kind of intelligence. And so with the Pentagon being interested now, all of a sudden, things flip. The CIA gets a green light to reach out, and they follow Tolka Jeff's instructions. They get the phone number and they call twice from public phone booths in Moscow. But both times, Tolkachev's wife answers. And so they hang up.
- [33:56]
Gordon Carrera
And so it's still not worked. So despite the plywood boards, everything else. But at least now they're trying. At least now they finally got the message, and they're trying to reach out to him. And he's still trying to get hold of them.
- [34:07]
David McCloskey
Yeah, and he's still trying. So in March, Tolkachev finds the Chief of Station again, and he slips a packet of taped paper into the Chief of Station's hands. And at last, here, Tolkachev reveals his identity and gives some information on his background to establish his bona fides. So the note has the PO Box of the institute where he worked, which identifies him as an employee of the Scientific Research Institute for radioengineering. Just a great, wonderfully anodyne, bureaucratic kind of Soviet name. And it gives them, I think it gives CIA this, this kind of confidence that they can actually put an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency kind of out to start interacting with Tolkachev. And so at last, here in the spring of 1978, well over a year after Tolkachev's initial bump, the man who's going to become Tolkachev's kind of first case officer actually goes to the Bolshoi Ballet. He's at a performance of Anna Karenina. He goes out during the intermission and calls the number, calls Tolkachev at home, uses a code name, says it's Nikolai, says, hey, we've gotten all your letters and we want to contact you.
- [35:23]
Gordon Carrera
So it looks like contact is finally being made. Maybe this is a good point to just look at who Adolf Tokachev really is. I mean, we know he's driven and relentless. We know he's an engineer. But what is driving him? I mean, what's his motivation in wanting to take what are extraordinary risks, you know, with his life to do this?
- [35:43]
David McCloskey
Yeah, Tolkachev is. I find him to be a really fascinating psychological case because. So he's 50 when he raises his hand to work for CIA in 1977. A bit on him. I mean, he's a loner, doesn't have many friends. Although that seems again, from a lot of these cables that Hoffman cites in his book. You know, you get the sense that it's not because he's desperately trying to make friends, it's that he's sort of withdrawn in many ways. You know, he's an introvert. He and his wife and his teenage son live in a very comfortable high rise apartment in central Moscow, which is actually quite close to the US Embassy. It's kind of filled with the upper crust of Soviet rocketry and aviation. So there's a lot of engineers in his building, there's a lot of pilots in the crawl space, in the kitchen, kind of in a. Where he's got all his camping equipment. We talked about him as an, you know, a very kind of outdoorsy person. He's also going to stash all of his spy gear there. Interestingly, his wife Natasha, he says, you know, she's never going to find it there because she's very short and I guess unable to actually get even on a chair to kind of reach the crawl space. No one has any interest in going there. He is very devoted to his wife. And he actually tells CIA in one of these notes that he's the kind of person who's only destined to fall in love once.
- [37:08]
Gordon Carrera
And his wife, it's fair to say, is an important part of his motivation and his story, isn't it? I mean, in terms of why he's become disillusioned with the Soviet Union and why he wants to do something about that disillusionment as well, I think it's.
- [37:22]
David McCloskey
Fair to say that the roots of the treason are in his wife Natasha's family line, because Natasha's mom. So what would have been Tolkachev's mother in law had actually been shot during the terror in the 1930s under Stalin. Yeah, Stalin's terror. These sort of purges of the Moscow elite that happened in the 1930s. So Natasha's mother shot her father, goes to prison camp when Natasha's a toddler because he hadn't denounced his wife. And so Natasha, Tolkachev's wife grows up in state orphanages and actually did not see her father again until she was 18 in 1953, after Stalin dies. And so she has essentially grown up an orphan thanks to Stalin and his terror and the Soviet system. And so I think Tolkachev and his wife Natasha are ideological defectors from the Soviet system probably from a very young age. And, you know, interestingly enough, Tolkachev doesn't tell his wife what he's up to. But I think it's fair to say that she would have probably agreed with his desire to inflict maximum damage on the Soviet system. And in fact, at one point, just as sort of a familial side note in the story, Natasha is going to find some of the spy gear that Tolkachev will end up getting and tell him, you know, you gotta cut this out. I mean, you know, we're all going to go through hell if you get caught. But she doesn't. It's not like she's going to inform on him. She doesn't raise it again, and so they never talk about it again.
- [38:57]
Gordon Carrera
So, I mean, the roots are quite deep and familial. But by the 70s, you've got the dissident movement. You've got a sense of kind of disillusionment, haven't you, with the Soviet Union. Feels like that then leads him somehow, maybe at that point in life, to action, to actually trying to do something about it.
- [39:12]
David McCloskey
Yeah, I think that this kind of elite opposition, frankly, coming from academics and writers, think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is writing in this time, and Tolkachev is very aware of him and desperately wants to read his stuff. I think Tolkachev realizes that something needs to be done. And in the quote that you read in your wonderful Russian accent, Gordon, at the beginning of this episode, my Sean Connery RUSSIAN accent Sean, your Marco Ramius RUSSIAN accent. You know, Tolkachev says, there's this inner worm that started to torment me and something had to be done. And I think, you know, Tolkachev, he kind of toys around with, do I write a dissident pamphlet and put something out? And I think there's an important bit on his psychology here, Gordon, which is it's pretty stock and trade in CIA to say that somebody volunteering to become a spy or being convinced to become a spy is a bit of a psychological outlier. You're not a normal person if you're willing to betray the system that has brought you up, and if you're willing to essentially give state secrets to a foreign actor, there's probably something a little wrong with you. And I think, although I applaud Tolkachev's desire to see Soviet Communism destroyed, I think he's a bit of an egotist, too, because you think about he's a nobody engineer, is thinking about writing dissident pamphlets. I think he's got a sense that he's absolutely right. And he is a man who is sort of destined to change history, to do what he can, to Bring down the Soviet system.
- [40:52]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, Normal people don't spy, as someone puts it. And I mean, to have the desire to do it, to take the risks, and as we've seen, to be so relentless in his pursuit of the CIA, frankly, despite their apparent lack of interest, I think does suggest something very unusual.
- [41:09]
David McCloskey
And I think, Gordon, we sort of painted this picture of a guy who's. He's got this deep family opposition to the Soviet system. I mean, a little bit like Marco Ramius, who's lost his wife because this sort of corruption inside the Soviet system, and his wife is dying. And yet, I think a key event in his sort of progression to becoming a spy is that in 1976, about a year before he first volunteers that Soviet pilot defects with a plane, with a MiG to Japan. And the Soviet authorities begin ordering Tolkachev's institute to redesign the radar. And so Tolkachev sees, I think, in that set of events that his greatest weapon isn't going to be writing a pamphlet, but it's going to be giving the institute's research to an enemy of the Soviet system, the United States.
- [42:02]
Gordon Carrera
So he's realized he's got something that can do real damage. So he's got the motivation and he's got the access, and he's got this kind of amazing, kind of relentless desire to do damage, you know, to the regime which he serves, which has led him repeatedly to contact, you know, the CIA. So we're back at this point where he's finally made contact with them. And now let's look at it from the. I guess from the CIA's point of view. Having looked at it from Tolkachev's point of view, they've got this potential asset, you know, someone who now they've worked out is interesting, has got real intelligence that's valuable that their customers, as you put it, you know, want. But actually meeting someone in Moscow, I mean, this is the bit I find really fascinating, is not easy. I mean, if you are in that CIA station in Moscow, you know, that group of spies who are operating out of the embassy, you are under intense pressure, aren't you? I mean, you've got the resources of the KGB directed at watching you, keeping you under surveillance, stopping you meeting someone.
- [43:03]
David McCloskey
Like Tolkachev, I mean, you essentially have surveillance on you everywhere. If you're an officer in Moscow, the KGB basically knows who all the CIA officers are, except for a very few of kind of the deep cover ones who might have kind of innocuous jobs in the embassy, like their cashiers and their Clerks and things like that. And interestingly enough, these kind of deep cover people, there's Russian nationals who are on the embassy compound, of course. And so if you're one of these deep cover officers, you know, you're actually having to communicate with the station, not by going in and talking to people most of the time, but actually by interoffice dead drops because they couldn't be seen anywhere near the door.
- [43:43]
Gordon Carrera
So if you're a deep cover CIA officer in the embassy, you can't go into the CIA bit of the embassy because there are locally hired staff watching you who are Russians, and you'll be reporting. So you're basically passing messages secretly within your own embassy compound. That's how hard it is.
- [43:59]
David McCloskey
That's right. The brief periods where you could actually go into the station, they're rare. Right. And those officers really look forward to them because they're sort of hiding, obviously, everything about their true purpose for being in Moscow from everyone around them, including other Americans in the embassy almost all the time. So, you know, you're watched all the time in Moscow. Gordon, you and I have a great mutual friend, former CIA operations officer named John Cipher, who has this wonderful sort of surveillance story from his time working in Moscow, which is there's a case officer, and this, this is after the. The Tolkachev case, but I think illustrates the sort of really awful, grinding nature of the surveillance in the Soviet system. There's a case officer, CIA case officer in Moscow station. You know, he goes out running. He's a big, you know, he likes to go run around Moscow. And it's springtime. It's one of the few times in Moscow where you can actually kind of go out and enjoy the weather. And he goes out for a run, kind of unplanned, on a new route. Goes running and comes back and a pair of his shoes are gone. Now, where did they go? Obviously, the KGB who had been watching him, didn't like that he'd kind of gone out for this run without them being able to really know where he was going. They maybe figure he could have been operational. They're sending him a signal, don't do that anymore. So he goes, at this point, in Moscow, there's a Reebok store. He goes, he buys a new pair of shoes. Those shoes get stolen. So he's kind of ticked about this. So he looks up at the ceiling and he says, hey, guys, I need to run. It's what keeps me sane. Here's the route I'm going to take. Here's the generally When I'm going to go running the next day, the shoes are there, back, put back in his apartment. Guy goes running. And of course, the KGB has these surveillance vehicles that are right there waiting for him on the route. They pop open the trunk, they get these foldable bicycles out, and literally just trail him as he runs. And so you have this sense of like, just everything is happening under the watchful eye of the kgb. You know, your apartment is going to be bugged. Husband and wife teams, or not even teams, but just couples who are there are going to be writing notes to each other on paper kind of set against wood or metal, because they don't want to leave an impression on a page underneath that the KGB might come in and read. You know, and the other great kind of anecdote of Moscow in this period is that every CIA officer would become familiar with the surveillance teams that are actually watching them and would try to understand when they had surveillance and when they didn't. And sometimes they would recognize that there was another individual in one of the surveillance cars. And this was the KGB psychologist who was assigned to their case and assigned to know everything about their lives, their family, their personality, how they behave under stress, under pressure, what their schedule is. And also, I mean, sometimes it kind of flips from just being slightly humorous, like the shoe story, to being people being harassed. You know, there are stories about Americans, dogs being killed, air being let out of tires, you know, a fridge unplugged while you're gone, all the food goes bad, poop left in the toilet. Gordon, can you believe this? While, you know, someone's out. And so it is the big leagues for the CIA, right? This is a place you want to be, surprisingly. And the environment is really rough. I mean, even the office. When we talk about the station in Moscow, it is basically a windowless rectangular box up on the embassy's seventh floor, which is, I think, the title of a new book coming out. Gordon, I'm Not.
- [47:39]
Gordon Carrera
Another plug. Nicely done.
- [47:41]
David McCloskey
Sure. And it's shielded in metal. It's isolated from the walls of the rest of the building. It's this very tight space. We talked in the Iran episodes about music playing during an operation. So there's always music going in the station from a cassette player. And the other thing that comes out, and you talk to officers who serve there is the dry air in Moscow was terrible. And so everything inside is overheated, so your fingers are kind of cracked and bleeding. There's big jars of Vaseline on everyone's desk, and they're sticking Gobs of Vaseline up their noses all day even. I mean, the station itself is so isolated from the rest of the embassy that the case officers have to clean the toilets themselves. Right. There's no cleaners coming in there, so there's like a sign up sheet for cleaning duty. So this place is kind of, it's a bit of a dichotomy because it is a primo slot for a CIA officer in the 1980s. And it's also day to day, just a really miserable and grinding environment. And these are the people. This is kind of the petri dish that the team running Tolkachev is going to come out of.
- [48:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And so, as you say, this is the kind of pinnacle, if you like, of the spy game is to be able to operate in Moscow. I mean, it's why you hear this phrase, Moscow rules, often used in terms of, you know, kind of spy jargon and it's, you know, bled into fiction. And, and it's this idea that you have to have the strictest standards of your, your tradecraft, the way you operate in order to be able to do anything in Moscow, to be able to deal with that kind of surveillance, to be able to run an agent like Tolkachev. And it, you know, it does sound intense. I mean, it sounds also quite unpleasant. You know, it does not sound glamorous. It's not all going to the Bolshoi and, and things like that. But I guess if that's the A game, if that's the highest place to play this spy game, then if you're driven, that's where you want to be. I guess, you know, you want to be in Moscow and to do it because of the intensity of it and because of what's at stake, because you're up against the kind of toughest adversary you could be battling. And, you know, here we are with Tolkachev with an agent who looks to be, you know, the golden goose, who looks to be the real deal. I mean, someone who'll become known as the billion dollar spy because of the kind of secrets he's got access to. The question though is can they run him, can they meet him, can they keep him safe? I mean, he is a man who's going to be under intense pressure himself and who is putting his life on the line to do this and to provide those secrets. We'll find out next time on the Rest is Classified.
- [50:14]
David McCloskey
See you then. Thanks for listening.
- [50:23]
Gordon Carrera
Hello, it's Gordon here, and if you've been enjoying the Rest is Classified and are after more Espionage content. I've got very good news for you. We have ways of making you talk. Another podcast from Goal Hanger that focuses solely on World War II has just released a special series on female spies during the Second World War. And it's featuring the brilliant Claire Mully, a friend of mine and an amazing historian. Now, amongst the stories they're going to discuss is the tale of Christina Skarbek, the Polish beauty queen who became an SOE agent and undertook extraordinarily dangerous missions in Nazi occupied Poland and France. Such was her success that she was once described as Churchill's favourite spy. To give you a taster, here's a clip from the series. Just give us a. This amazing woman. Absolutely an incredible woman. Without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Just a minute. On Christina Scarbeck. Well, we were talking about being the originals, you know, the originals of the SAS the other day. She is the original.
- [51:26]
Alexandra Daddario
She is first woman to serve Britain as a special agent even before SOE was established. And actually the longest serving special agent, male or female, for Britain during the Second World War. Yeah, indeed. Six years. Six years. So, yeah, she was banging on the door of SIS MI6 in 1939. Not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on.
- [51:49]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [51:49]
Alexandra Daddario
And of course the young men in there, and they were all young men, just laughed at her.
- [51:52]
Gordon Carrera
Okay, but what's her motivation for that?
- [51:54]
Alexandra Daddario
Well, she's Polish born, Christina Scarbak, or.
- [51:57]
Gordon Carrera
Christian by this time.
- [51:58]
Alexandra Daddario
No, she was actually then married to her second husband who was a diplomat in Southern Africa when they heard the news of the outbreak. So they turned around to come back to serve their nation, Poland. But they had to come back with wartime conditions, very slowly in convoy around sort of possible submarine areas. So by the time they got back, Poland, of course, never capitulated, but had fallen and been occupied and divided. And so she felt that the fastest way she could join the Allied effort was to volunteer, volunteer for the British Special Forces. So there she is demanding to be taken on and. And they just laugh at her because she's not British and above all she's a woman and there are no women doing this work, but she's just too good to be turned down.
- [52:37]
Gordon Carrera
How does she know which doorbell to ring to go and see sis?
- [52:39]
Alexandra Daddario
Well, I mean, she, she'd done a bit of journalism before the war and she definitely was moving in those circles in Poland and internationally. Yeah, she'd been in Paris, her husband was a well known diplomat. So yeah, she had contacts. We don't entirely, no, but we know some people who could have put adjacent enough.
- [52:56]
Gordon Carrera
Exactly. And after all, journalism, diplomacy, there is some interface, lots of people double hatting in those worlds. Yeah, so.
- [53:04]
Alexandra Daddario
Yeah. So because she served directly for Britain during the Second World War, most of her papers are in the National Archives at Kew. And the first memoir in there is really fantastic. It's these young men who describe her as expert skier, a great adventuress and absolutely fearless. But what I loved is one of them had penciled in the margin. But she terrifies me. That gives you an idea of her character. And despite everything, you know, she had, she was a gift horse. They couldn't look in the mouth. She had the right contact, she spoke the right languages and she knew secret routes in and out of occupied Poland. Because as a rather bored countess at the. When she was married to her first husband, actually, she used to smuggle cigarettes by skiing over the high Tatra Mountains, in and out. And actually she didn't even smoke. She was one of the few women in 1930s Europe who didn't smoke. She just did it for kicks, just for the thrill of it. But it meant she knew the smuggling routes in and out of the mountain.
- [53:58]
Gordon Carrera
So in February 1941, for instance, she's taking microfilm.
- [54:01]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [54:02]
Alexandra Daddario
She served in three different theaters of the war. So this is the first one she is serving as sort of working in intelligence and as a courier.
- [54:09]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [54:09]
Alexandra Daddario
She made the first contact between Britain and the fledgling Resistance in Poland, which of course is the first occupied nation. So Britain's desperate to find out what's going on in the country. So she skis in, gets rid of her skis and then she goes around the country, she makes contact with the Resistance, she collects information from them, but she also undertakes her own intelligence, going around the country, seeing where troop movements are and so on, and then takes microfilm and other material, first coding information so we could establish radio contact with the Polish Resistance, skis back over the mountains to Budapest where she's based, and hands it over to both Polish and British resistance contacts.
- [54:46]
Gordon Carrera
Can we just sort of go back a bit? Because she's arrived in London in 1939, back end of 1939, says you need to take me on. They eventually say, yes, okay, fine, yep.
- [54:56]
David McCloskey
Then what?
- [54:56]
Gordon Carrera
I mean, she has training.
- [54:58]
Alexandra Daddario
No. Well, she's trained later on, she's trained.
- [55:00]
Gordon Carrera
In 41, she's volunteered to MI6. SIS.
- [55:03]
Alexandra Daddario
That's right.
- [55:04]
Gordon Carrera
So she's been taken on by SIS.
- [55:05]
Alexandra Daddario
So they do give her a false identity. She's sent to Budapest and she's meant to be A French journalist. I mean among her language skills she's completely fluent in French and that's not unusual. Hungary hasn't fallen yet. There's lots of international journalists based there, seeing what's going on in Eastern Europe. So she's sent out there and from there she independently goes across the mountains. And she does make contact with the fledgling Polish resistance. The first time she skied in is actually with the pre war Olympic Polish skiing champion, champion, which is quite handy. And then when she comes back she makes contact with the man, Andrew Kowarski, who becomes one of her, her main partners in the war, who's a one legged veteran. He's got a prosthetic, one wooden leg which is quite useful actually because he whittled a hole in it and would hide information, hide stuff in his leg. This is why I don't write novels.
- [55:53]
Gordon Carrera
We just touched on it a moment ago that soe, the creation of soe, and she predates this. But this is really the sort of significant thing that happens in British efforts to famously set Europe ablaze. I mean we're doing a podcast about secret agents about soe. We have to say set Europe ablaze or we'll be run out of town, won't we? We have to use get through that bit.
- [56:15]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [56:16]
Gordon Carrera
And this is really, really important, isn't it? Because when we've talked about SIS here, but here's an actually separate organization being set up quite deliberately partly under the.
- [56:24]
Alexandra Daddario
Wing of sis, even though there was huge problems between them.
- [56:27]
Gordon Carrera
Well, yes, I mean it's sort of Venn diagram. They sort of phase in and out of one another as the war runs. And is soe under SIS's purview or.
- [56:35]
Alexandra Daddario
It wasn't, but it was partly from SIS, partly from section D, Defer Destruction, which is, you know, Big bang sabotage, which is partly why sas, of course, which is Silent Intelligence, didn't get on with them.
- [56:45]
Gordon Carrera
And if you want to hear those episodes, search. We have ways of making you talk wherever you get your podcasts.