The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

He had asked the CIA for a suicide pill in case of arrest, and after three refusals—the CIA’s self-imposed requirement—he had been given a cyanide capsule concealed, like the one given Ogorodnik, in a fountain pen.

A thin, stooped man who stood just five feet five inches tall, Tolkachev was still in his fifties, but he looked ten years older. Born in 1927 in Kazakhstan, he grew up in Moscow, where he and his wife, Natalia, both worked at the same research institute while raising their son, Oleg. They shared a life of relative comfort as part of the Soviet nomenklatura and made their home in #1 Ploshchad Vosstaniya, one of the city’s “Seven Sisters,” a Stalinist wedding-cake apartment building reserved for the pampered Soviet elite on Moscow’s Garden Ring.

Yet even as he rose through the system, Tolkachev brooded in silence. He harbored a deep hatred for the Soviet system, fueled in part by the ruthlessness with which the state had dealt with his wife’s family. Natalia’s mother had been executed during Stalin’s reign of terror in 1938, and her father had been imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for years and died shortly after his release in 1955. Eventually, some relatives had emigrated from Russia to Israel, but Tolkachev never told his CIA handlers whether he or his wife was Jewish.

All Tolkachev had in life was his wife and son. By the mid-1970s, he had become obsessed with somehow reaching beyond himself and dealing the system a heavy blow. He envied the dissidents who were beginning to challenge the Soviet system. Perhaps, he mused, if he had been a writer, he could have published samizdat, the underground dissident literature that had emerged in Moscow in the 1970s. But he was a scientist at a secret military design facility; with his security clearances, he could never attend a meeting of dissidents. The KGB would immediately discover him and he would be fired from his job—and perhaps arrested. He didn’t dare tell anyone he knew about his attitudes toward the government, for fear that he would be denounced. For years, he admired the dissidents from afar but took no steps to join their cause.

Finally, he settled upon a simple solution. He would become a silent dissident. He would become a spy for the United States. But how could an unassuming, middle-aged scientist with no intelligence background get in touch with the CIA in the heart of Moscow? Tolkachev’s zeal for his new task overcame his natural caution, and he decided that the simple and direct approach was best.

He was just turning fifty when he took the plunge in January 1977. At a gas station reserved for foreign diplomats near the U.S. embassy, he walked up to a car with diplomatic license plates and asked the driver if he was an American. When the man said yes, Tolkachev dropped a note through the car window and walked away.

By coincidence, the American happened to be Robert Fulton, the CIA’s Moscow station chief, who hurried back to the embassy to examine the note. Tolkachev had written vaguely that he had information that would be of interest and wanted to talk to someone about providing it to the United States. He didn’t identify himself in the letter and gave no indication of what that information might be.

It was the kind of “volunteer” approach that happened periodically in Moscow, perhaps half a dozen times a year, and that usually turned out to be either a KGB provocation or the product of a Russian’s overheated imagination. Once, for instance, the CIA had received a letter from a man living in Kaluga, Russia, who said he was in “electronics” and wanted to help. A CIA officer went to extraordinary lengths to break free of surveillance so as to call him from a pay phone; it turned out he was in home electronics, and the joke became that the CIA had found its own toaster repairman. In the endless stream of volunteers there was always, it seemed, someone with information on how the KGB was controlling the minds of Russians through dental implants, using the electric power grid to transmit their orders. So Moscow Station was skeptical when Tolkachev first made contact, and Fulton did not respond to his note.

But Tolkachev refused to accept this silent rejection. He watched for Fulton’s car and left a second note. The CIA again chose not to respond, and Tolkachev tried yet again with a third note. Through his insistent notes, the CIA began to realize that he was a serious volunteer. The frustrated scientist wrote in one message that he could understand why the CIA was not responding, that they might fear he was a KGB provocateur. But he added that he was not willing to say more about who he was or what he knew for fear the information would fall into Soviet hands.

By the time Fulton left Moscow for home, Tolkachev had dropped three notes, none of which had been answered. When Gardner “Gus” Hathaway took over as Moscow chief in mid-1977, Tolkachev was continuing to leave notes and was still being ignored by the CIA.

Stansfield Turner had imposed his Moscow stand-down, preventing Hathaway from responding, but the station chief soon began to plead with Washington to let him contact the anonymous volunteer. Jack Downing, now back in Washington from Moscow and serving as Turner’s special assistant, also lobbied his boss to lift the ban on Moscow operations.

Meanwhile, Tolkachev was growing bolder. He gave a note to Hathaway that included a portion of his telephone number. He said that if the Americans came to a certain bus stop at a certain time, they would see him holding an object that had the last two digits of his phone number on it. The CIA sent an officer out, and sure enough, he got the complete telephone number. By now, Turner had relented. He decided to let Hathaway contact the mysterious volunteer. But when an officer, briefly free of surveillance, called the number