The two sides continued to miss each other for months. Unaware that the CIA had tried to phone him, Tolkachev left another note for Hathaway, and when that failed to prompt a response, he finally approached the Italian majordomo of Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. As the man stepped out of a car with American diplomatic license plates and walked into a Moscow market, Tolkachev sidled up to him. He asked if he could get a message to an American diplomat. When the man said yes, Tolkachev handed him another note.
Tolkachev had by then made half a dozen approaches, and the CIA was increasingly convinced that not only was he a genuine volunteer, but he was gambling with his life in his reckless bids to reach out to them. It was time for them to seize control and create a secure means of communications with their eager volunteer. Still, Hathaway had to move gingerly; any foul-up with this operation might convince Turner to shut things down in Moscow for good.
Ducking out during an intermission in a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, Hathaway’s deputy, John Guilsher, managed to stay free of surveillance long enough to call Tolkachev from a pay phone. This time he found him home. He immediately told him that the United States had received his messages and that it was time for him to stop his approaches. For his own safety, he would have to be patient from now on.
The next time Guilsher called, he was at a pay phone near Tolkachev’s apartment. Come out to the pay phone, Guilsher told Tolkachev, and pick up the dirty glove you’ll find in the booth. Inside the glove, Tolkachev found a message from the CIA along with secret writing materials and questions for him to answer to prove that he had the kind of access to Soviet technology he had claimed in his notes.
When Tolkachev mailed his answers to an accommodation address in Germany, the agency’s experts immediately realized that he was the real thing: a scientist with incredible access to Soviet secrets. They concluded he was not a double agent; there was no way the Soviet government would dangle a man who actually handled such vital military information. After the CIA had pored over his answers, Guilsher was told to recontact Tolkachev in January 1979.
This time, Guilsher called from a pay phone near Moscow’s Gorky Park and asked Tolkachev to come out immediately to meet him. The two men walked around the park and began laying out a plan for Tolkachev’s espionage career.
It soon became clear that Tolkachev could not be handled through the traditional and impersonal methods the CIA preferred to use in Moscow. He was prepared to provide several dozen rolls of film at a time, far too much material to be left at a dead drop in an alleyway. He would have to be met in person, regularly, by a case officer in Moscow. To arrange the meetings, the CIA would communicate with Tolkachev through sophisticated short-range burst transmission devices, including a new system called Discus, which could send messages of up to 2,300 characters as far as a mile away.
After that first meeting, Tolkachev and Guilsher met about once every three months. At first, Tolkachev provided long, handwritten notes on the advanced “look-down, shoot-down” radar systems for Soviet fighter aircraft that he was helping to design. Before long he was given a 35 mm camera and film, and he began handing over bags filled with rolls of photographs of classified documents from his institute. Tolkachev amazed his handlers with his prolific production; at one meeting alone, he turned over 174 rolls of film, with 36 exposures apiece. Tolkachev didn’t have a private office at his design bureau, but he was willing to take huge risks, photographing documents at his desk with co-workers nearby. He learned to pile stacks of books around him so that he could photograph documents without being observed. Inside the office, he used miniature cameras provided by the CIA; at first, he was given a “molly,” a camera the size of a matchbox. Later, the CIA replaced it with a T-100, a slender cylinder about 11⁄2 inches long, followed by the more advanced T-50. But he preferred the more reliable 35 mm camera and would often take documents home at lunchtime or overnight and photograph them in his apartment before returning them to the design bureau’s library.
His production astonished the CIA and made him a secret superstar inside the American national security apparatus. At Langley, insiders liked to say that Tolkachev “paid the rent” for the agency, justifying the CIA’s budget virtually by himself. His intelligence allowed the U.S. Air Force to see what the Soviets were planning for their next generation of fighter aircraft, and that meant that new American planes could be engineered to defeat them before the Soviet fighters ever flew.
Among the many secrets Tolkachev handed over during his six years as a spy were the designs for the avionics, radar, missiles, and other weapons systems for the MiG-23; the missile and radar capabilities of the MiG-25; and the existence of the new Su-27 fighter and the MiG-29 and its advanced radar. Tolkachev’s information also frequently showed the Pentagon how its research to counter Soviet systems had been heading down the wrong track, and several American defense programs were revised or scrapped as a result. In December 1979, the Air Force completely reversed direction on a $70 million electronics package for the F-15 fighter aircraft. In a 1979 memo to CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Air Force Chief of Staff General Lew Allen Jr. stated simply that Tolkachev’s intelligence “was of incalculable value.” In May 1979, the CIA hosted a three-day seminar for a small group of officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Air Force, and other agencies to review Tolkachev’s work. The consensus was that Tolkachev had saved the U.S. military “billions of dollars and
