There had been no resistance. The CIA’s superagent had gone limp, his knees buckling under him. In those first seconds, Tolkachev’s arms were pinned to his sides and Sharavatov deftly forced a thick rope between his teeth to prevent him from swallowing or biting down, in case he had a suicide pill hidden in his mouth. His jacket and shirt were roughly stripped from his shoulders, in case a poison pill had been sewn into his collar. He was then dragged to a windowless bus, where he was expertly stripped, with gloved hands probing his body cavities, and dressed in a blue KGB running suit.
The KGB’s fear of the CIA’s “special preparations,” as the suicide pills were darkly known, had its roots in a case that had gone bad eight years earlier. Alexander Ogorodnik had been a fast-rising young diplomat, an assistant to the Soviet ambassador to Colombia, when he began a secret affair with a Spanish woman living in Bogotá. Thanks to a well-placed wiretap at the Soviet embassy, the CIA was able to eavesdrop on conversations between Ogorodnik, who was married, and his Spanish lover. The CIA’s Bogotá chief approached the woman, and she agreed to work with the agency to win Ogorodnik over. She even showed the CIA a secret journal he had entrusted to her, his “testament,” which revealed his hatred of the Soviet system. The woman was willing to cooperate because she hoped that if her lover began to spy for the CIA, he would stay with her in the West. But the CIA had other plans.
Ogorodnik agreed to switch sides. Before long, he was allowing the Americans to photograph documents shipped by diplomatic pouch between the embassy in Bogotá and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. At the CIA’s urging, Ogorodnik, now code-named TRIGON, accepted a transfer to the Foreign Ministry’s operations center. He received secret training in Bogotá on how to use dead drops to communicate with the CIA in Moscow.
Before leaving Bogotá, Ogorodnik demanded to meet the CIA officer who would be handling him in Moscow. Jack Downing, who was slated to be the next deputy chief in Moscow, flew down to Colombia in the summer of 1974 to reassure him. The two men, both in their thirties, developed a quick rapport, and Ogorodnik soon trusted Downing enough to tell him that he wanted the CIA to give him the means to end his life on his own terms if he was captured. In dramatic meetings, Ogorodnik told Downing that he wouldn’t go back to Moscow unless he was “treated like a man” and given suicide pills. The CIA reluctantly complied, and Ogorodnik returned home. He divorced his wife after returning to Moscow, but he never saw his Spanish lover again.
From 1974 until 1977, Ogorodnik served as one of the CIA’s most valuable spies in Moscow. He gained access to much of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s overseas cable traffic and was able to hand over top-secret Soviet diplomatic documents that gave the United States unprecedented insights into Moscow’s negotiating positions during the strategic arms talks of the 1970s. But he was remembered within the KGB mostly for what happened during his arrest. While the precise details of the incident remain murky, it is clear that soon after his arrest, Ogorodnik took the modified Montblanc pen Downing had given him in Bogotá and used the suicide pill hidden inside. He must have slipped the pen into his mouth and, while cupping his hands over his face, bit down through the stress-weakened barrel and into the cyanide capsule concealed inside it. Still cupping his hands over his nose and mouth, he would have taken three quick breaths, as Downing had instructed him. Before his stunned KGB captors could react, TRIGON was dead.
Near panic broke out in the Second Chief Directorate, and careers were very nearly ruined as a result. From that moment forward, new arrest procedures were put into effect.
Krassilnikov’s radio crackled again. “Narziss is in the operational area. He made a quick pass by Olga and is now on a bench five hundred yards away.” Olga was the name the CIA’s “poets”—the men and women in Langley who carefully prepared the instructions in Russian for Tolkachev—had used for tonight’s meeting site on Kastanayevskaya Street. Now, their own communications plan was being used for a KGB ambush.
Moscow, 2010 Hours, June 13, 1985
Paul Stombaugh sat alone on a bench in the dark, trash-strewn courtyard of a concrete apartment block. The smell of dog feces assaulted him. He had stopped his final run a few hundred yards short of the site where he was to rendezvous with Tolkachev for a brief encounter, known inside the CIA as a “bren.” Unfamiliar with the lay of the land in this area of Moscow, Stombaugh had come to the quiet residential street twenty minutes early. He made one quick pass, saw everything was normal and as described in the casing report, and left the area to stage for the meeting. The only thing that seemed unusual was a large trailer parked on Kastanayevskaya Street about fifty yards from the meeting point, its hitch propped up on cinder blocks. He thought the trailer seemed out of place in a residential neighborhood, but he decided to go ahead with the meeting anyway and settled on the bench to prepare himself.
Killing time without attracting attention was a challenge in a Moscow neighborhood. Stombaugh leaned back and sipped water from a vodka bottle, hoping he looked like just another tired Russian worker escaping reality on a summer evening. He ran through a mental inventory of what he had to accomplish in the next half hour. He quickly checked his miniature tape recorder—all meetings with Tolkachev were recorded, so that every tidbit of the conversation could later
