Washington, D.C., 1230 Hours, June 13, 1985
At almost the exact moment that Rem Krassilnikov was waiting to spring his trap on the streets of Moscow, Aldrich Ames walked into Chadwicks restaurant, a smoky, down-home hamburger and beer joint crammed into an old storefront on the Georgetown waterfront, hidden under the shadows of the Whitehurst Freeway overpass.
Ames was carrying with him a bag filled with classified documents. He had come to meet Sergey D. Chuvakhin, a Soviet diplomat whom Ames was supposedly trying to recruit as a spy for the CIA. In fact, their relationship was very much the other way around. Chuvakhin was now an intermediary between Ames and the KGB, a convenient cutout since Ames had CIA authorization to meet with him. Over lunch in one of Chadwicks’s long and darkly wooded booths, the two chatted quietly, and, when their meal was finished, Ames handed Chuvakhin his bag, which contained, among other things, a list of nearly every Russian agent working for the CIA and FBI. In exchange, Chuvakhin gave Ames a shopping bag filled with cash. It was at that moment that Aldrich Ames irretrievably crossed the line into a life of espionage.
This was the third time Ames had contacted the Russians since he had decided to become a spy. On April 16, he had walked straight into the Soviet embassy in Washington and volunteered his services, and then he met Chuvakhin on May 17 for lunch. Ames later insisted that he hadn’t given the Soviets much of any value until this lunch at Chadwicks. At first, he said, he had tried to scam the Russians, feeding them information about their own double agents.
But on May 19, the FBI arrested John Walker, the longtime leader of a Soviet spy ring in the U.S. Navy, throwing a scare into Ames. Ames didn’t buy the FBI’s story that Walker’s ex-wife had turned him in; he figured somebody inside the KGB had fingered him. So, to avoid Walker’s fate, he decided he had to wipe out anyone who might betray him. He turned over to the Soviets the identities of virtually every Russian spy in the American inventory. Of course, he also betrayed agents who could never have endangered him, including Adolf Tolkachev.
What Ames could not know as he walked out of Chadwicks with a bag full of cash was that the KGB already knew about Tolkachev; he was already in a Soviet jail. Paul Stombaugh was just about to spring Krassilnikov’s trap, and Ames’s decision to compromise the CIA’s most important spy had been irrelevant. Still, the KGB would soon begin to exploit the cache of secrets Ames had handed over.
Moscow, 2030 Hours, June 13, 1985
Stombaugh took in the street scene with a sweep of his eyes as he rounded the corner of the apartment block and stepped out on Kastanayevskaya Street. Fifteen yards ahead and on his left, an attractive young woman with dyed red hair was waving her hands in animated conversation in a telephone booth that had been marked as a “taxi phone” on the diagram of the meeting site. Tolkachev’s car, with its familiar registration number, was parked on the far side of the street. The parked car was the reassuring “safe, ready to meet” signal he was looking for.
Stombaugh began to walk briskly now, covering the last few yards toward a bench on the far side of the street. Tolkachev was not yet in sight. The pretty redhead in the phone booth ignored him as he approached and kept talking. He was running over in his mind the inventory of actions he had planned for the next few moments when Tolkachev would step out, give the verbal parole, then walk with him into the recesses of a wooded area. There, he would quickly take the used cameras, still sealed with their microfilm inside, stash them in his jacket, and hand over the two shopping bags. If both men sensed it was safe, they could move to Tolkachev’s car, where there might be some time for the small talk that had always been so reassuring to Tolkachev during these dangerous meetings over the last six years. Then they would part, heading in opposite directions, each left to deal on his own with the adrenaline rush of clandestine espionage.
As he passed the phone booth and turned toward the meeting point a few yards away, Moscow exploded around Paul Stombaugh. At least five men burst from the cover of trees and brush. Two grabbed his arms from behind as two others snatched the heavy shopping bags from his grip. A fifth man forced his head down as the men holding his arms lifted them high above his head in what had become known as the “chicken wing” seizure, a characteristic modus operandi of KGB arrests. He heard the tailgate of the parked trailer slam to the ground. The night air filled with voices of the men who had been hiding inside, waiting for the trap to be sprung.
Stombaugh almost blacked out from the pain in his shoulders. When he was allowed to stand again and look around, he found the immediate area bathed in light, cameras rolling and flash bulbs popping. Across the street, Stombaugh saw a small group of men quietly observing the arrest scene. Among them was Rem Krassilnikov.
As he was loaded into a KGB van, Stombaugh glanced back to see the redhead in the phone booth, still talking, still showing no signs of having noticed the events taking place across the street. Two KGB men held Stombaugh’s arms over the back of the seat in the van for the long ride to Dzerzhinsky Square and the Lubyanka; by now the pain in his shoulders was almost blinding.
Stombaugh never saw the man being roughly led off in the distance, the man carrying a book with a white cover.
Langley, 1700 Hours, June 13 1985
COPS—the SE Division’s chief of operations—was the first senior officer
