At the outset, the longevity of his career as a double agent is somewhat surprising, but can be explained by his extreme caution. Unless, of course, he was a false double agent and a man who only betrayed when ordered to do so. An example of his excessive caution can be seen in the way he made contact with his American case officers, always using the correct Soviet procedures. He always refused face-to-face contact and chose the location of the dead letterboxes (the hiding placing that can only be accessed after completing a very complicated process) himself, this allowing him to communicate with the Americans. Later on and still in an attempt to avoid unnecessary physical contact, he demanded to have access to the most sophisticated technology. Consequently, the CIA concocted an ingenious course of action: the use of a transmitter that was capable of sending radio waves that were so compressed they were virtually undetectable. This meant that he could pass an American building while inside some form of public transport and simply click the lock on his briefcase and send a message that would otherwise have taken up fifty typed pages of documents.
To return to the beginning of his collaboration with the Americans in the early 1960s, there are two versions that currently exist. The first is that Polyakov was approached in New York not by the CIA, but by the FBI. In the US, the federal agency is also responsible for counterintelligence and so there was nothing to prevent the FBI from poaching a Soviet official.
The second version seems more plausible, given Polyakov's personality, and sees the Soviet taking the initiative and contacting the Americans. But why? Once again we enter the realms of hypothesis and the first explanation of his betrayal could be that he was deeply affected by the horrors of the Second World War and wanted to spare his country the drama of a second conflict. He feared that a war might one day break out between the two superpowers, but as a patriot, naturally wanted the USSR to emerge victorious. However, he did not want to see the Soviet regime and its corrupt leaders triumphant, but rightly or wrongly, believed that the Americans were being naive and had not fully recognised the Soviet threat. Sooner or later he believed that they would eventually succumb and be eaten by a fish much cleverer than themselves.
Constantin Melnik
103
Must we believe [Polyakov] when he affirmed during his trial that he had rebelled - in an unfathomable paradox of the human soul - following the break up to the communist system after the death of Stalin; a system to which he had been so enthusiastically devoted during his youth?This hard line Stalinist was now apparently leading the defence for democracy. Instead we should consider his whole demanding temperament and that this high-flying spy could not accept the petty bureaucratic cowardice of the regime. Day to day intelligence is not about the exploits of Richard Zourgue or Kim Philby, not to mention that idiot James Bond...
[Thus according to Malik, it is this revolt against an exacting and callous organisation that pushed him to devote his body and soul to a democratic system.]
There have been other spies and influential agents - Georges Paques in particular -who thought they were working for peace by betraying their country, as they believed that in doing so, they were helping to maintain a military and strategic balance between East and West. The difference here is that Polyakov believed that it was the West that was in need of help as it had underestimated the USSR's power and its ability to cause harm. We now know that this was not the case and that his analysis was incorrect, at least from a strictly military point of view. In the late 1970s, Yuri Andropov (the head of the KGB and later president of the USSR), secretly drew up a catastrophic picture of the competition between the USA and the USSR, to the detriment of the latter.
According to other sources, another reason that many have strengthened the Soviet's resolve to betray his country was that while stationed in New York in the early 1960s, his eldest son, who was then very young, fell gravely ill. Polyakov requested that his child be cared for by the best doctors, which was expensive, but his superiors refused to grant him the necessary funds and the child died. Did this mean that Polyakov now conceived a definitive hatred against the Soviet authorities?
Another question is what was the exact nature of the information that Polyakov passed on to the Americans, firstly to the FBI and then to the CIA while he was in Burma and India? According to some experts, his information was extraordinary, even claiming that there was so much of it that two rooms in Langley had to be devoted to him. However, this exaggeration is no doubt linked to the propaganda that would later surround Polyakov and the CIA's wish to celebrate his success.
A catalogue of the spy's revelations, however, do have some semblance of reality. Firstly, Polyakov handed over many military secrets regarding Soviet weaponry and technological developments. This means he would have given the CIA, documents on Soviet anti-tank
