Typically, when an operation was carried off successfully in the heart of Moscow, right in the middle of a rolling sea of KGB surveillance, Langley wouldn’t hear about it until the next morning. To keep the KGB from guessing that an important operation was under way, case officers returning from a late-night run would simply “get black,” disappear into the city, and wait until the next morning to reinsert themselves into their cover jobs at the embassy. So only when the officer reported to work the next day would he go through a thorough debriefing, while the tape recordings of his brief encounter with the agent were transcribed.
That was when a flurry of messages would come pulsing into Langley, providing the details of how the run had unfolded the night before. Adrenaline would be pumping across the cable traffic, and well into the next day it would infect the small circle in the SE Division managing the case. Days later, the tape recordings of the agent meeting would arrive by diplomatic pouch, allowing senior SE Division managers to hear the tense voices and feel the strained emotions of the Moscow street encounter for themselves. They could then try to gauge the state of mind of an agent most of them had never met, as well as the performance of a case officer trying to ask all the right questions while constantly scanning his surroundings for signs of the KGB.
Success took a while to percolate through the system. But word of failure came quickly. It would originate in Moscow in the middle of the night, a clipped cable chasing the sun and arriving in Washington in the early evening. The first sign of trouble might come from the wife of a Moscow officer, signaling that her husband had failed to return home on schedule. A few hours later, confirmation would come that the officer had been arrested and that a consular officer from the embassy had been dispatched to secure his release from the KGB’s Lubyanka Center at #2 Dzerzhinsky. Tonight’s message, Gerber knew, meant that Stombaugh, a young former FBI agent now on his first CIA tour, had been ambushed while tracing the run that he had choreographed so carefully.
Gerber made a few quick calls back to headquarters, to make sure that Clair George, Deputy Director for Operations, and others on the seventh floor knew what was going on. After that, he sat down for dinner, determined to go through with his plans to participate in the IO exercises. But even the steel-willed Gerber couldn’t keep his mind from wandering back to Stombaugh and to Tolkachev.
He could only imagine how the night’s drama had played out eight time zones away in Moscow.
2
Moscow, 2010 Hours, June 13, 1985
The headset crackled with a one-word message: “Narziss.”
In the darkened rear compartment of an unmarked, windowless KGB van, Major General Rem Sergeyevich Krassilnikov, white haired and imperturbable, shifted slightly in his seat. Krassilnikov knew that the young CIA officer code-named Narziss—the pretty one—was about to fall into his trap.
The CIA had tried to fool him, to lull his watchers, Krassilnikov thought. They had wanted him to believe that this was down time for the Main Enemy. The CIA’s Moscow chief had just departed the capital with great operational clatter on a trip to the North Caucasus. He had applied well in advance for permission to travel and had provided a thorough itinerary to the Foreign Ministry, who passed it to #2 Dzerzhinsky. He had also “talked to the walls” in his apartment, giving his KGB monitors the clear impression that mid-June, with the chief away, was going to be a slow period for CIA watchers in Moscow. Was this trip to the Caucasus another trick? Krassilnikov could only wonder what kind of a special services chief left his post at such a time. A clever one, possibly.
But Krassilnikov was confident that the bait for tonight’s trap would be irresistible. The KGB had found a ringer for Adolf Grigoryevitch Tolkachev, and his job tonight was to walk a few dozen yards carrying a book with a white cover, a mere fifty paces, in Tolkachev’s shoes. Nothing complicated. From a hundred feet away, his CIA contact would catch a glimpse of a man he would conclude was Adolf Tolkachev being arrested and dragged into a van. It would be just enough for him to report back to Langley that Tolkachev had been free until that awful moment, sowing seeds of doubt as to when and how the KGB had discovered the spy.
Adolf Tolkachev had been a devastating spy, but he hardly looked the part. A slightly built scientist in his late fifties, Tolkachev worked quietly at a top-secret aviation design bureau in the heart of Moscow. He had been spying for the CIA for the past six years, long enough to have accumulated two code names, CKSPHERE and GTVANQUISH. (GT was a CIA digraph, two successive letters placed before a code name to identify the geographic region of an agent or operation. GT had only recently replaced an earlier Soviet digraph, CK.) Tolkachev had eluded the KGB long enough to deliver tens of thousands of pages of secret documents to the CIA, looting his design bureau’s classified library.
But now he was in the Lefortovo investigative and pretrial prison, undergoing enforced “cooperation” with KGB interrogators while he awaited the inevitable—trial, conviction, and certain execution. The KGB had patiently pieced together Tolkachev’s communications plan—how he would signal for meetings with the CIA or, conversely, warn his American handlers of trouble. Krassilnikov and his Second Chief Directorate, the KGB’s counterintelligence watchdogs, had carefully triggered the communications plan calling the CIA out for tonight’s scheduled meeting. As Stombaugh approached the meeting site, Krassilnikov was certain the CIA didn’t have a clue that its prized agent was in prison.
Tolkachev’s capture some two months earlier had been brutally efficient. A team from the
