The Rest Is Classified - 14. Crossing the Iron Curtain: The CIA’s Mole In Moscow (Ep 1)

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

How did the CIA recruit a Russian asset in Moscow during the height of the Cold War? Why would someone be so determined to defect from the Soviet Union and spy for the US? And what would happen if the KGB found out they had a traitor in their midst? Adolf Tolkachev had a vendetta against the Soviet state and became determined to orchestrate its demise. An expert on Soviet radar, Tolkachev realised his top secret work could help the US fight his communist overlords and potentially topple the entire system. So, how did he do it? Listen as Gordon and David start to tell the story of the man who became the CIA’s most valuable Russian spy. ------------------- Pre-order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now Gordon, you have been a NordVPN user for over a year now, and why in the world do you like them so much? So many reasons, David, but one feature in particular that I love is that with just one subscription you can keep multiple devices safe, up to 10 at once with the NordVPN app. So I've got a lot of phones and laptops around the house which I've used over the years in various places and to keep them all safe and secure I do use that NordVPN. You can also protect unlimited devices on your router by using NordVPN which

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edge of technology. Here, innovation isn't a buzzword. It's a way of life. You'll be solving customer challenges faster with agents, winning with purpose, and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent-first future together. Head to salesforce.com slash careers to learn more. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young

son. But her maternal instincts take a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best, yet fiercest part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Nightbitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Nightbitch is now streaming only on Disney Plus. Hello everyone, Gordon here. Now just before we get to the latest episode of The Rest is Classified, we have got some

exciting news to share with you. Now David, if I'm not mistaken, something significant is coming down the line. That's right, Gordon. So my latest book, The Seventh Floor, is coming out in the UK on Thursday, the 30th of January, which is wonderfully, tremendously exciting news. It is a book about a mole operating in the highest reaches of Langley on the Seventh Floor, which is the executive suite where the CIA director and all of his or her minions have their offices.

It's a story about a Russian mole inside CIA and a CIA officer's attempt to root them out. It's full of kind of modern trade craft and settled right in the middle of the present day spy war between Washington and Moscow and Gordon. It features one of your favorite topics, crazy Russian illegals up to no good. Moles, minions and Russian illegals. It sounds great and I've read it and it is great.

Even more excitingly, there's going to be the chance to see both of us in person as we're going to be doing an event also in London at the end of the month, aren't we, David? That's right. So on the 28th of January at Waterstones Trafalgar Square, and by the way, there's a link for tickets to this event in the episode description box. But on the 28th of January at Waterstones Trafalgar Square in London, Gordon and I are going to talk about the seventh floor. We're going to talk about the show, the rest is classified,

and we're going to probably reveal some of our favorite spy secrets along the way. I'll also mention that Waterstones has signed editions of the book, if anyone wants to pick those up in advance. Yep, so the location and the time is not classified. In fact, you can find it in the show notes. We've just declassified it. Declassified it, find it in the show. We've just declassified it.

Declassified it. It's in the show notes. Do come along if you can. But with that, enjoy the episode. Some inner worm started to torment me. Something has to be done. I started to write short leaflets that I planned to mail out, but later, having thought it out properly, I understood this was a useless undertaking. To establish contact with dissident circles which have contact with foreign journalists seemed senseless to me. Due to the nature of my work, I have top secret clearance. Based on the slightest suspicion, I would be totally isolated or liquidated. Thus was born my plan of action to which I have resorted." That is Adolf Tolkachev writing to his CIA handlers describing how he chose to become a spy and his drive to destroy the Soviet

Union from within. Welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. I'm David McCloskey. And this is the story, Gordon, as you mentioned, of Adolf Tolkachev, who I think we could say might have been or probably was the most valuable CIA spy in Moscow during the Cold War. Or Moscow, I should say.

Moscow? Moscow rather than Moscow. But anyway, keep going. I've been told it's more of an Acton accent. Is that right, Gordon? No, just keep going. Sorry to interrupt. So he's the most valuable spy in Moscow in the 1980s.

He's an expert on Soviet radar whose intelligence was valued and this is insane, valued by the US government at around $2 billion. So he is the billion dollar spy, which is also the title of an exceptional work on Tokachev by a man named David Hoffman and we'll be drawing extensively on that book as we tell this story. But this, Gordon, I think is a story of really the height of the Cold War, this battle between the CIA and the KGB, this kind of spy war that's going on at the absolute apex of the Cold War in the middle of the 1980s. And it is, Gordon, I think, to kind of get the zeitgeist.

In 1984, it is the hunt for Red October, which is the film adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel by the same name, is coming out and it comes out right as the CIA is in the middle of running Adolf Tolkochev as a spy. And in that film, as in the book, you know, we have these superpowers sort of competing for military primacy, there is a battle over the technology that is going to provide an advantage in the Cold War. And of course, in Red October, we have Captain Marco Ramias, who sort of wonderfully played by Sean Connery, although with a slightly dodgy accent, I should say, in that film.

Was the Hunt for Red October, did that do well in the UK? Yeah, it did. Did that sort of impact the 80s in the UK as it did here? I think he didn't quite play it with the Russian accent. But he didn't have the accent that you did when you were reading that Tolka chat quote. Thank you. I didn't try. That's a proper Moscow accent.

And of course, in the novel, Hunt for Red October, as in the movie, we have the Soviets have this what's called a caterpillar drive on their subs that make them very quiet and undetectable by U.S. sonar. And so we have this sort of battle over technology. And Sean Connery is this disillusioned Soviet captain whose wife has died at the hands of an incompetent doctor and he's the sort of defector from within on the Soviet system. He's trying to bring this technology to the United States so the United States can have it and give Washington an advantage in the Cold War. And what I think is incredible about the Tolkachev story is that we have, I think in the person

of Adolf Tolkachev, someone who's actually quite similar to Marko Ramies, the Sean Connery character in that he, Tolkachev, is a member of the Soviet elite. He is a radar engineer and technician and designer who is working on cutting edge Soviet aviation technology. Like Conner, he has this burning desire to wreck the Soviet Union from within. Yeah. I think what also is interesting about this is it does have, even though it's a story of Cold War espionage, it's still got a real contemporary relevance because one of the things that we've heard the CIA and MI6 directors saying

recently is that they're open for business from disillusioned officials in Moscow who want to spy for Western intelligence. They've been putting out videos on Telegram, on social media, providing instructions of how if you like to contact the CIA and to provide intelligence. So this story, though, gives a sense, I think, of just how hard it is to run an agent in Moscow under the eyes of Russian intelligence and the Russian security services, then the KGB, now the FSB, and just the challenges involved in that,

but the centrality and the importance of those human sources which are at the heart of this business. Well, and I think this is where, again, so much of the detail that we're going to talk about here comes from that wonderful book by David Hoffman, The Billion Dollar Spy, because he gets into, by virtue of having access to much of the cable traffic from inside CIA about this case, he gets into the nitty gritty, kind of the details of very specifically, how do you run an asset in Moscow, right?

How do you communicate? How do you pass information? How do you pass goods? Where do people store their spy gear? How do you take photographs? I mean, this is one of those cases where we really have a light shown on the practical realities of running a spy in Moscow. This is one of those cases where we really have a light shown on the practical realities of running a spy in Moscow.

Now, of course, this is a case from the 80s. The trade craft has changed, but a lot of the fundamentals around communication and around, as we'll see, how do you detect surveillance, there's been adaptations and evolutions, but a lot of the basic principles are still the same. And so I think listeners will get a real picture here of just how kind of end to end the CIA runs and recruits a human asset in Russia. Now, Adolf Tokachev, the man who will become the billion dollar spy, he literally drops

into CIA's lap. And I think this is something also that listeners may be a little surprised at, which is, at the end of the day, there are a very, very small number of human assets that really pay all the bills at CIA or probably any other intelligence service. You'd be surprised at just how few of them there are and how the ones that are really valuable are essentially covering the budget for the entire agency in terms of their value. And interestingly, those types of assets almost always volunteer. They are very rarely recruited over this long painstaking process of trying to convince

them. They tend to drop in our laps to some degree and that is the case with Adolf Tolkachev. Now what happens here is it is January of 1977 in Moscow. The best time of year to visit Moscow I'm told is in January. It is very cold. The CIA's station chief in Moscow is filling his car up with gas at kind of one of these stations that are reserved for you know foreign diplomats and officials. And a mystery man, who's Adolf Tolkachev walks up and asks that if the chief of station is American, now he can tell from

the diplomatic plates that the man is American, but he wants to confirm. And the man who walks up this guy, Tolkachev, he's got brown hair, he's got a crook in his nose from a kind of boyhood hockey accident. He's got a very broad forehead and he kind of reminds me, and I don't know Gordon if this will resonate with our British listeners, he reminds me a little bit of Herman Munster from The Munsters. He's got very distinctive features and a very big forehead.

I have to say, when I looked at pictures of him and people can look those up if they want to see him, he doesn't look like your kind of top research scientist to me. He doesn't look like the nerdy research scientist. He's got that kind of broken nose. He looks more like a boxer. He looks more like the kind of the thug,

the kind of hired help you'd expect working for the kind of KGB or something like that in their stereotype, rather than if you like this quite intense and clearly very clever Engineer that is right. He's got a tough look to him and you know, he is An active outdoorsman loves fishing loves hunting loves being out and his dacha in the countryside, you know He runs in the mornings. He likes to ski. He's he's an outdoors guy, he's an active guy. And you know, at this point though, what's interesting, and we'll come to this later on, is the agency doesn't know who

he is, and they have absolutely no idea why in the world he is contacting the chief of station. And we'll get to that. So Tolkachev later is going to say, and this comes from the CIA has done some unclassified write-ups on Tolkachev, Tolkachev later notes that he had decided that the driver of the car he chose to approach had to be an American and not a Russian chauffeur. Due to his quote, bright and beggarly clothing, trousers which had never seen an iron, no Russian chauffeur of a diplomatic vehicle would ever dress like that. So in other words, the chief of station was

dressed so low rent that Tol Tokachev figured he could not be driving a well placed Russian around. So Tokachev puts a piece of paper in the front seat and walks away. CIA again doesn't know his name doesn't know anything about him. And later in the station, the chief of station reads the note Tokachev basically quite vaguely says I want to discuss matters on a strictly confidential basis with an appropriate American official. And Tolkachev then suggests a discrete meeting at a given time and place in the car of an

American official at like a metro station entrance. I mean, even that seems quite risky to me, but he's clearly thought about it, Tolkachev, and he's been planning this and has worked out that might be a secure way of meeting someone. Because there still seems even risk to that putting a note in an American's car or suggesting meeting in their car. I think it is worth noting just how high risk these seemingly innocuous things are. Talking to an American, putting a note in the car. I mean, these are the kind of things that could ruin his entire life if he's spotted. And if the KGB runs it down, I mean, at this time, Gordon, I mean, the KGB is maybe like a million strong, the vast majority of their sort of human capital.

The KGB are in the second chief directorate, which is internal security watching Russians in Russia. So Tolkachev has a lot of things to worry about, but he's an engineer at heart. He's very precise and he's got sketches of the exact locations and where the car should be parked. He's clearly thought this through and you would expect that, hey, a Russian has dropped into our lap, right?

CIA would be chomping at the bit to talk to this guy. Well, the CIA is quite apprehensive. Maybe that sounds abnormal, but it's actually quite common in this period for notes to get dumped into Americans cars so that a note being dropped in the chief of stations window is not so crazy. It happened a lot in the summertime Russians trying to contact Americans. And also, the KGB, Gordon, as you all know, has a long track record of entrapping Americans. The idea here being the KGB gets a CIA officer or even a diplomat lures them into meeting

with a Russian and then expels them. And it creates massive sort of problems in the pipeline to staff Moscow Station and the embassy if the KGB is booting people out. Yeah, it's called a dangle, isn't it? And you dangle someone who's under your control as the KGB to the CIA and say, you pretend he wants to spy for them and it allows you to identify all the CIA officers. You know, that's something both sides do to each other. So there's a natural caution about a note being passed rather than thinking, oh, great, here's a potential spy for us.

Exactly. And so, you know, there's also some stuff going on in the high level kind of bilateral relationship. This is January of 77. So the Carter administration is taking power in Washington. The incoming Secretary of State is coming to Moscow to kind of lay the basis for bilateral relationships between the US and the Russians and the new administration. And so DC, Langley, they don't want anything on the streets of Moscow to kind of complicate that.

So they ignore Adolf Tolkachev. Now, Tolkachev is absolutely relentless, which is thematic in his character. He tries two more times in February of 1977. He knocks on the window of the chief of stations car, he drops papers inside. He kind of, he starts to give, I think, Tokuchev is realizing that the CIA needs a little bit more from him. And so he gives in one of these notes, a bit of biographical detail that he works for what he calls a closed enterprise, which is basically a secret facility for defense work. And you know, again, the CIA still doesn't bite.

Now there's a fourth try in May of 1977. Tolgachev had been kind of hiding in a phone booth, just to hand off a package to the chief of station. But the chief doesn station. But the chief doesn't roll down the window, drives off. CIA headquarters at Langley has instructed the chief to ignore Tolkachev. And again, you mentioned, you know, sort of dangles and expulsions on either side. A Soviet diplomat has just been expelled from New York. And CIA thinks, you know, again, the KGB is dangling someone at us to kind of retaliate in Moscow. So let's just back off this guy.

So we've had four tries in the span of about four or five months, and every time he's gotten the cold shoulder from CIA. Which must be bizarre, mustn't it? You think I'm trying to spy for you. Let me, let me, let me give you some top secret information. And no one seems to want to listen to it. But what's interesting is he doesn't give up, which suggests a kind of drive. And we'll get to his motivations later, but it does suggest a really kind of

intense desire to do this and to take more and more risks. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I've wondered about this as we, you know, we're preparing the story. Is Tolgachev confused by this response? Is he perplexed? I would imagine to some degree he is, but he's also intimately aware of how his own system functions. He is not a country bumpkin who has no concept

of how Soviet power functions. He understands, I think, the KGB, he understands the risks in the system. And he probably understands the sort of reluctance on the part of CIA to, you know, just take the bait, as it were. And so, you know, I think he probably has some appreciation for the caution that the CIA is going to show. And I think, frankly, as we'll get in further into the story, I think it probably informs some measure of the respect he has for the cautious way that CIA will eventually run the case. Now, why all this apprehension though? I mean, there's got to be something else going on. Well, another bit of this story is that 1977 has been shaping up to be a very, very bad year in Moscow station. So that year, the CIA loses a prized asset in Moscow, a foreign ministry official who had been recruited in Columbia and who had come back into Russia, was spying for CIA.

There's probably a whole separate pod, Gordon, that we could do on this case because it's absolutely incredible. But so the CIA has lost an asset in Moscow and this guy had actually been given a suicide pill that they'd been snuggled into a pen. When caught, he asked for the pen to write his confession, bites into it, dies. So CIA has lost this asset in dramatic fashion. CIA doesn't know at this point how this asset had been blown. In September, the CIA is going to lose another source. And then, in top of

all of that, there's a new CIA director in town, of course, with the Carter administration coming in, a man who's very suspicious, I think you could say, Gordon, of CIA. His name is Admiral Stansfield Turner. He's a Navy man. He's a four-star admiral, had been commander in chief of Allied forces in Southern Europe. And he is, I think, deeply skeptical of the value of human intelligence. There's these stories of him coming in and seeing some of the first images being beamed down from spy satellites up to that point. There'd actually been film that had been sort of floated down, picked up by planes to get developed.

You know, it took a while. Now you're literally having the images kind of beamed down. Stansfield Turner calls it TV in space. And there's kind of this massive, I think cultural and philosophical chasm between Turner and the CIA's director of operations. And Turner also has really kind of roughed up CIA in his first year in office. And so with that context in mind,

Tokachev is trying and he's pushing against the door, which seems pretty firmly close. He realizes he's got to give them something more, doesn't he, to actually convince CIA that he is the real deal and not some kind of dangle and that he's worth, I guess, taking a risk of. In that context, you know, Tukhlochev doesn't know any of this, but he's kind of asking the CIA officers in Moscow to take a pretty big risk in their system. Because also, I mean, the other bit of context here we should add on 1977 is that there's a fire at the embassy in moscow the us embassy and no one quite knows the time how it started but it's believe that the soviet send kg fireman. Up to try to put it out and the chief of station literally stand in the door to prevent these kg officers from going into moscow station so the kind of the the CIA is adding all of this stuff up and saying, OK, do we have a mole? Are the Soviets wise to some of our trade craft in Moscow?

Is the KGB reading our comms? And all of this culminates at the end of the year with Stansfield Turner, the CIA director, essentially ordering a freeze in clandestine operations in Moscow until they can guarantee no more compromises, which, of course, to these, you know, DO Directorate of Operations officers, it sounds insane. But they've got this diktat from the CIA is seventh floor, that basically says no operations just kind of stand

down. So Tolkachev is really asking a lot of these Moscow station officers who I think probably would have behaved more aggressively on the case, if given the chance, they're being asked to sort of, you know, hold back and kind of let the Tolkachev thing play out without doing much. Okay, David. So with that freeze in place from Langley from the US side on carrying out operations in Moscow and Tolkachev desperate to actually meet with the CIA and give them intelligence. Let's take a break and see how they finally get in contact when we come back.

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When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan. And there is absolutely no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. Well, welcome back. It is December of 1977. It has been almost a year since Adolf Tokachev first tried to make contact with CIA, and he has still not had a single meeting other than these sort of bumps with CIA officers on the streets of Moscow. And Tolkachev, as we had said, is a relentless character. And he tries again, even in the middle of this stand down in Moscow stations, of course he doesn't know about, but he is going to push through.

And what Tolkachev does in December of 77 is he essentially replays the initial drop that he had made on the chief of station back in January. He goes to a gas station, get one frequent in by foreign diplomats, finds an American diplomatic car. This time it's not the chief of station. It's the major Domo of Spasibo house, which is where the U S ambassador lives in Moscow. And a major Domo Gordon, is that a Downton Abbey reference? I think I've, I think I've seen that

kind of person sort of downstairs. Is that right? What's the name? They run the house? Is that what he runs the house? Yeah, the house being the US the US ambassadors residents, not Downton Abbey. Yes, yes. And the major Domo takes the information into the embassy gives it to the ambassador, it sort of works its way through the embassy system, gets to the CIA. And what Tokachev has provided is two typewritten pages of intelligence about Soviet military radars. And this is coming on the heels of a Soviet MiG pilot who had actually defected to Japan with the aircraft.

And Tolkachev says that that MiG-25, that the technicians inside the Soviet system after the defection are now furiously reworking the radar configuration. And Tolkachev also says that he has the schematics for what's called a look-down, shoot-down radar, LDSD, which is not a psychedelic drug, but is in fact, a really interesting piece of military intelligence that the CIA and the Pentagon, you know, sort of official Washington would be really keen to know and Gordon, it's basically a capability that would allow Soviet planes at very high altitude to spot planes or missiles flying below. And that is, I mean, it sounds a little bit, I guess, technical, but basically what it is,

is it would close what the Americans see as kind of a key gap in Soviet coverage, which is that during a, I guess, a US sort of missile bomb strike, nuclear strike, whatever, the US could fly missiles or bombers at low altitudes, and they would be invisible to Soviet radar. So the Soviets are sort of working to close this gap. And Tokachev is sort of dangling in front of CIA that he might have intelligence on specifically how they're trying to close that gap. So we don't need to get too deep into the technicals of it,

but it's clearly in the world of kind of Cold War technology, as you were saying, to start with Humphrey Red October, this is a kind of key capability, which the Soviets developing which the US wants to know about. So Tolkochev has given them something, which I guess he knows will be of great interest to the CIA and to Washington. And that's what's got him over the line or what gets him over the line, isn't it? Is the clear proof that he's got something of value to them rather than just being a dangle

or someone trying to offer them low grade stuff. And this is where you do start to see the tenor of the case flipping and kind of, you know, the CIA starts to perk up, but Tokachev hasn't really given them schematics or specs yet. He's just said, I have these, and he's been able to describe it in kind of enough detail to sound believable.

And I think it's sort of a fascinating window into just how this kind of this push and pull between Moscow station and then these more risk averse forces at CIA headquarters, because there's a back and forth in the cable traffic over the next few weeks, which again, the Hoffman book, Billion Dollar Spy, kind of wonderfully lays out, which is that, you know, Moscow station is essentially saying, let us do something and meet with this guy, try to get in touch with him. And there's a memo that basically says, OK, there's two options, which I love because frankly, it defies the famous advice from

Henry Kissinger, I believe that you should always have three options, you know, an A, B, and a C and sort of the middle ground is the one you want the policymaker to choose. But there's only two in this case. Option B is let's go ahead and meet with him. And what do you think option A is Gordon? What's your guess on on what the proposal is there? Do nothing. Do nothing. Do nothing to it's too risky. It could lead to another expulsion prolong the stand down. The CIA there's sort of this hand wringing of you know, Tolga Jeff might have initially

been sort of genuine, but now he's being monitored by the KGB and we're being set up. And you know, this is another bit of it which we alluded to earlier is like the CIA station in Moscow is not massive, the officers there are really valuable. Two case officers had been sent home the previous year. And if you know, the KGB burns one of us meeting with this guy, we lose another. And so again, the answer is do nothing. And Tokachev comes back. Oh, and interestingly, sort of from a bureaucratic perspective, because I love these Tokachev, he's not a recruited asset yet by any means, but the CIA will still give developmentals a kind of a cryptonym. And so he is encrypted as CK Sphere. You'll remember Gordon from our wonderful journeys through coup attempts in Iran that in the 50s, the sort of digraph, those first

two letters of the case for Ajax were TP Ajax. Here CK denotes a Soviet division case and Sphere is kind of Tolkachev's kryptonym. So he'll be known and kind of talked about inside station, inside Langley as Sphere. But they've given him the kryptononym, but they're still hot. He's still banging his head against the wall almost literally. And he doesn't give up. He does not give up. It is February of 1978.

He has been at this for over a year. Tolkachev shoves another note through another car window. And in it this time, he includes this is where I think Tolkachev is. He's many things. He's highly creative, and he includes in it his phone number, he excludes the last two digits. He says, I'll be on a certain street corner, and he's got a little diagram of where he'll be holding a plywood board with the last two numbers on a particular date. And so he's giving the CIA a way to contact

him. Again, can I just say that someone standing up with a plywood board with two numbers on it would seem to me to be the most suspicious thing in Moscow. And yet this is his kind of clever way of not giving you know, giving the last two digits of his phone number to them. I mean, it works. So I guess, you know, I guess he knows what he's doing. But it's just interesting how people come up with these slightly slightly what appear to be crazy ideas.

Yeah, I suppose you're right. If I reflect on if I were standing on a street corner with numbers on a plywood board, it might draw more attention rather than less. I suppose it depends on how how big the board is, how big the numbers are. And this is another, I think, fascinating window into the bureaucratic machinery that propels these kind of cases, because all along, you know, CI headquarters has been saying brush him off, don't do anything, there's a stand down. And finally, what happens at around the time that Tolkachev has given his instructions

about the plywood board is that the Pentagon has kind of been looking through some of the initial stuff from Tolkachev. And they express interest. There's a memo that gets sent from the Pentagon to CIA where the Pentagon expresses an interest in intelligence on Soviet radars. And this starts to tip the balance. And it's a very common, I think, feature of how CIA sort of prioritizes and thinks about what kind of operations it is going to do or approve is the CIA is very customer driven. And so if an outside agency, particularly a senior customer at Pentagon or at the White

House or the State Department says, I really want something on X. That starts to give CIA collectors out in the field air cover to go and do these things, right, to produce that kind of intelligence. And so with the Pentagon being interested, now all of a sudden things flip, the CIA gets a green light to reach out and they follow Tokachev's instructions. They get the phone number and they call twice from public phone booths in Moscow, but both times Tolkachev's wife answers and so they hang up. It's still not worked. Despite the plywood boards, everything else, but at least now they're trying. At least now they finally got the message and they're trying to reach out to him.

He's still trying to get a hold of them, yeah? He's still trying to get hold of them. Yeah. And he's still trying. So in March, Tolkachev finds the Chief of Station again, and he slips a packet of taped paper into the Chief of Station's hands. And at last here, Tolkachev reveals his identity and gives some information on his background to establish his bona fides. So the note has the PO box of the institute where he worked, which identifies him as an employee of the Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering, which is a great, wonderfully anodyne bureaucratic kind of Soviet name. And it gives them I think it gives CIA this this kind of confidence

that they can actually put an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency kind of out to start interacting with Tolkachev. And so at last here in the spring of 1978, well over a year after Tolkachev's initial bump, the man who's gonna become Tolkachev's kind of first case officer actually goes to the Bolshoi Ballet.

He's at a performance of Anna Karenina. He goes out during the intermission and calls the number, calls Tokachev at home, uses a code name, says it's Nikolai, says, hey, we've gotten all your letters and we want to contact you. So it looks like contact is finally being made. Maybe this is a good point to just look at who Adolf Tokachev really is. We know he's driven and relentless. We know he's an engineer, but what is driving him? What's his motivation in wanting to take? What are extraordinary risks with his life to do this?

Yeah. Tokachev is, I find him to be a really fascinating psychological case because of is I find him to be a really fascinating psychological case because so he's 50 when he raises his hand to work for CIA in 1977. A bit on him. I mean, he's a loner, doesn't have many friends, although that seems again from a lot of these tables that Hoffman cites in his book, you know, you get the sense that it's not because he's desperately trying to make friends. It's that he sort of withdrawn in many ways, you know, he's an introvert, he and his wife and his teenage son, live in a very comfortable high rise apartment in central Moscow, which is actually quite close to the US Embassy. It's kind of

filled with the upper crust of Soviet rocketry and aviation. So there's a lot of engineers in his building. There's a lot of pilots in the crawl space, in the kitchen, kind of, and to be aware, he's got all this camping equipment. We talked about him as in, you know, a very kind of outdoorsy person. He's also going to stash all of his spy gear there. Interestingly, his wife, Natasha, he says, you know, she's never going to find it there because she's she's very short and I guess, unable to actually get even on a chair to kind of

reach the crawl space. No one has any interest in going there. He is very devoted to his wife. And he actually tells CIA in one of these notes that he's kind of person who's only destined to fall in love once. And his wife, it's fair to say, is an important part of his motivation in his story, isn't it? I mean, in terms of why he's become disillusioned with the Soviet Union and why he wants to do something about that disillusionment as well. I think it's fair to say that the roots of the treason are in his wife Natasha's family line, because Natasha's mom, so it would have been Tolkachev's mother-in-law, had actually been shot during the terror in the 1930s.

Under Stalin. Yeah, at Stalin's terror, these sort of purges of the Moscow elite that happened in the 1930s. So Natasha's mother is shot. Her father goes to prison camp when Natasha's a toddler because he hadn't denounced his wife. And the tasha told the chub's wife grows up in state orphanages and actually did not see her father again. It's all she was eighteen in nineteen fifty three after stalin dies and so she is essentially grown up in orphan.

Thanks to stalin and his terror and the Soviet system. And so I think Tolkachev and his wife, Natasha, are ideological defectors from the Soviet system, probably from a very young age. And interestingly enough, Tolkachev doesn't tell his wife what he's up to, but I think it's fair to say that she would have probably agreed with his desire to inflict maximum damage on the Soviet system. And in fact, at one point, just as sort of a familial side note in the story, Natasha's gonna find some of the spy gear that Tolkachev will end up getting and tell him, you know, you've got to cut this out.

I mean, you know, we're all going to go through hell if you get caught. But she doesn't, it's not like she's going to inform on him. She doesn't raise it again. And so they never talk about it again. So, I mean, the roots are quite deep and familiar, but by the 70s, you've got the dissident movement. You've got a sense of kind of disillusionment, haven't you, with the Soviet Union? It feels like that, that then leads him somehow, maybe at that point in life to action, to actually try to do something about it. Yeah, I think that this kind of elite opposition, frankly, coming from academics and writers,

think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writing in this time and Tokachev is very aware of him and desperately wants to read his stuff. I think Tokachev realizes that something needs to be done, you know, and in the quote that you read in your wonderful Russian accent, Gordon, at the beginning of this episode, my Sean Connery Russian accent, your Marco Ramious, uh, Russian accent, you know, Tokachev says there's this inner worm that started to torment me and something had to be done.

And I think, you know, Tokhachev, it kind of, he kind of toys around with, do I write a dissident pamphlet and put something out on it? And I think there's an important bit on his psychology here, Gordon, which is, it's pretty stock and trade in CIA to say that somebody volunteering to become a spy or being, being convinced to become a spy is a bit of a psychological outlier. You're not a normal person if you're willing to betray the system that has brought you up and if you're willing to essentially give state secrets to a foreign actor, like there's probably something a little wrong with you. And I think although I applaud sort of

Tokachev's desire to see Soviet communism destroyed, I think he's a bit of an egotist too. Cause you think about, you know, he's a nobody engineer is thinking about writing dissident pamphlets, you know, I think he's got a sense that he's absolutely right and he is a man who is sort of destined to change history, to do what he can to bring down the Soviet system. Yeah, normal people don't spy, as someone puts it. And I mean, to have the desire to do it, to take the risks, and as we've seen, to be so relentless, you know,

in his pursuit of the CIA, frankly, despite their apparent, you know, lack of interest, I think does suggest something very unusual. And I think, Gordon, we've sort of painted this picture of a guy who's, he's got this deep family opposition to the Soviet system. I mean, a little bit like Marco Ramias, who's lost his wife because this sort of corruption inside the Soviet system and his wife is at him.

And yet I think a key event in his sort of progression to becoming a spy is that in 1976, about a year before he first volunteers, that Soviet pilot defects with a plane with a MiG to Japan, and the Soviet authorities begin ordering Tolkachev's Institute to redesign the radar. And so Tolkachev sees, I think, in that set of events, that his greatest weapon isn't going to be writing a pamphlet, but it's going to be giving the Institute's research to an enemy of the Soviet system, the United States. So he's realized he's got something that can do real damage. So he's got the motivation and he's got the access and he's got this amazing relentless desire

to do damage to the regime which he serves, which has led him repeatedly to contact the CIA. We're back at this point where he's finally made contact with them. Now, let's look at it from the CIA's point of view, having looked at it from Tolkachev's point of view, having looked at it from Tolkachev's point of view. They've got this potential asset, someone who now they've worked out is interesting, has got real intelligence that's valuable that their customers, as you put it, want. Actually meeting someone in Moscow, this is the bit I find really fascinating, is not easy. If you are in that CIA station in Moscow, that group of spies who are operating out

of the embassy, you are under intense pressure, aren't you? You've got the resources of the KGB directed at watching you, keeping you under surveillance, stopping you meeting someone like Tolkachev. I mean, you essentially have surveillance on you everywhere if you're an officer in Moscow. I mean, you essentially have surveillance on you everywhere. If you're an officer in Moscow, you know, the KGB basically knows who all the CIA officers are except for a very few of kind of the deep cover ones who might have kind of innocuous jobs in the embassy, like their cashiers and their clerks and things like that. And interestingly enough, these kind of deep cover people, there's Russian national, you

know, who are on the embassy compound, of course. And so if you're one of these deep cover officers, you know, you're actually having to communicate with the station, not by going in and talking to people most of the time, but actually by inter-office dead drops, because they couldn't be seen anywhere near the door. So if you're a deep cover CIA officer in the embassy,

you can't go into the CIA bit of the embassy because there are locally hired staff watching you who are Russians and you'll be reporting. So you're basically passing messages secretly within your own embassy compound. That's how hard it is. That's right. In the brief periods where you could actually go into the station, they were rare, right? And those officers really looked forward to them because, you know, they're sort of hiding, obviously, everything

about their true purpose for being in Moscow from everyone around them, including the other Americans in the embassy, almost all the time. So, you know, you're watched all the time in Moscow, Gordon, you and I have a great mutual friend, former CIA operations officer named John Seifer, who has this wonderful sort of surveillance story from his time working in Moscow, which is there's a case officer, and this is after the Tolkachev case, but I think illustrates the sort of really awful grinding nature of

the surveillance in the Soviet system. This is a case officer, CIA case officer in Moscow station. He goes out running. He's a big, he likes to go officer in Moscow station. You know, he goes out running. He's a big, you know, he likes to go run around Moscow. And it's springtime. It's one of the few times in Moscow where you could actually kind of go out and enjoy the weather.

And he goes out for a run, kind of unplanned, on a new route, goes running, and comes back and a pair of his shoes are gone. Now, where did they go? Obviously the KGB who had been watching him didn't like that he'd gone out for this run without them being able to really know where he was going. They maybe figure he could have been operational.

They're sending him a signal. Don't do that anymore. So he goes, at this point in Moscow, there's a Reebok store. He goes, he buys a new pair of shoes. Those shoes get stolen. So he's kind of ticked about this. So he looks up at the ceiling and he says, hey guys, I need to run.

It's what keeps me sane. Here's the route I'm gonna take. Here's the, generally when I'm gonna go running, the next day, the shoes are there, back, put back in his apartment. Guy goes running. And of course the KGB has these surveillance vehicles that are right there waiting for him on the route. They pop open the trunk, they get these foldable bicycles out and literally just trail him

as he runs. And so you have this sense of like just everything is happening under the watchful eye of the KGB. You know, your apartment is going to be bugged, husband and wife, teams, or not even teams, but just couples who are there are going to be writing notes to each other on paper kind of set against wood or metal because they don't want to leave an impression on a page underneath that the KGB might come in and read. You know, and the other great kind of anecdote of Moscow in this period is that every CI officer

would become familiar with the surveillance teams that are actually watching them and would try to understand when they had surveillance and when they didn't. And sometimes they would recognize that there was another individual in one of the surveillance cars. And this was the KGB psychologist

who was assigned to their case and assigned to know everything about their lives, their family, their personality, how they behave under stress, under pressure, what their schedule is. And also, I mean, sometimes it kind of flips from just being slightly humorous, like the shoe story to being people being harassed. You know, there are stories about Americans' dogs being killed, air being let out of tires, you know, a fridge unplugged while you're gone, all the food goes bad, poop left in the toilet. Gordon, can you believe this?

Well, you know, someone's out. And so it is the big leagues for the CIA, right? This is a place you want to be surprisingly. And the environment is really rough. I mean, even the office, when we talk about the station in Moscow, it is basically a windowless rectangular box up on the embassy's seventh floor,

which is I think the title of a new book coming out, Gordon, I'm not sure. And it's shielded in metal, it's isolated from the walls of the rest of the building. It's this very tight space. We talked in the Iran episodes about music playing during an operation. So there's always music going in the in the station from a cassette player. And the other thing that comes out and talk to officers who serve there is the dry air in Moscow was terrible. And so everything

inside is overheated. So your fingers are kind of cracked and bleeding. There's big jars of Vaseline on everyone's desk and there's sticking gobs of Vaseline up their noses all day. Even, I mean, the station itself is so isolated from the rest of the embassy that the case officers have to clean the toilets themselves, right? There's no cleaners coming in there.

So there's like a signup sheet for cleaning duty. So this place is kind of, it's a bit of a dichotomy because it is a primo slot for a CIA officer in the 1980s. And it's also day to day, just a really miserable and grinding environment. And these are the people, this is the kind of the Petri dish that the team running Tokachev is going to come out of. Yeah. And so as you say, this is the kind of pinnacle, if you like, of

the spy game is to be able to operate in Moscow. I mean, it's why you hear this phrase, Moscow rules often used in terms of, you know, kind of spy jargon and it's, you know, bled into fiction. And, and it's this idea that you have to have the strictest standards of your, your trade craft, the way you operate in order to be able to do anything in Moscow, to be able to deal with that kind of surveillance, to be able to run an agent like Tolkachev.

It does sound intense. It sounds also quite unpleasant. It does not sound glamorous. It's not all going to the Bolshoi and things like that. But I guess if that's the A game, if that's the highest place to play this spy game, then if you're driven, that's where you want to be, I guess. You want to be in Moscow and to do it because of the intensity of it and because of what's at stake because you're up against the kind of toughest adversary you could be battling.

Here we are with Tolkachev with an agent who looks to be the golden goose, who looks to be the real deal. Someone who will become known as the billion-dollar spy because of the kind of secrets he's got access to. The question, though, is can they run him? Can they meet him? Can they keep him safe? He is a man who's going to be under intense pressure himself and who is putting his life

on the line to do this and to provide those secrets. We'll find out next time on The Rest is Classified. See you then. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's Gordon here. And if you've been enjoying The Rest is Classified and are after after more espionage content I've got very good news for you. We have ways of making you talk.

Another podcast from Goalhanger that focuses solely on World War II has just released a special series on female spies during the Second World War and it's featuring the brilliant Claire Mullay, a friend of mine and an amazing historian. Now amongst the stories they're going to discuss is the tale of Christina Skarbek, the Polish beauty queen who became an SOE agent and undertook extraordinarily dangerous missions in Nazi occupied Poland and France. Such was her success that she was once described as Churchill's favorite spy. To give you a taster, here's a clip from the series.

Just give us this amazing woman. Absolutely incredible woman. Without hesitation, deviation or repetition, just a minute on Christina Scarberry. Well, we were talking about being the originals, you know, the originals of the SAS the other day. She is the original. She is first woman to serve Britain as a special agent even before SOE was established and actually the longest serving special agent, male or female, for Britain during the Second World War.

Yeah indeed, six years, six years. So yeah she was banging on the door of SIS MI6 in 1939, not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on. Yeah. And of course, the young men in there, and they were all young men, just laughed at her. What's her motivation for that? Well, she's Polish born, Christina Skarbek or Christine Granville. No, she was actually then married to her second husband, who was a diplomat in Southern Africa when they heard the news of the outbreak. So they turned around to come back to serve their nation,

Poland, but they had to come back with wartime conditions very slowly and convoy around sort of possible submarine areas. So by the time they got back, Poland, of course, never capitulated, but had fallen and been occupied and divided. And so she felt that the fastest way she could join the allied effort was to volunteer for the British Special Forces. So there she is demanding to be taken on and and they just laugh at her because she's not British and above all she's a woman and there are no women doing this work but she's just too good to be turned down. How does she know which doorbell to ring to go and see SIS? Well I mean she she'd done a bit of journalism before the war and she definitely was moving in those circles in Poland and internationally. Yeah she'd

been in Paris, her husband was a well-known diplomat, so yes she had contacts we don't entirely know but we know some people who could have put her in touch. Adjacent enough. Exactly. And after all journalism, diplomacy. There is some interface. Lots of people double hatting in those both those worlds. Yeah so because she served directly for Britain during the Second World War most of her papers are in the National Archives at Kew. And the first memory in there is really fantastic. It's these young men who describe her as expert skier, a great adventurous and absolutely fearless.

But what I loved is one of them had penciled in the margin, but she terrifies me. So that gives you an idea of her character. And despite everything, you know, she had, she was a good toss. They couldn't look in the mouth. She had the right contacts. She spoke the right languages and she knew secret routes in and out of occupied Poland because as a rather bored countess at the, when she was married to her first husband actually, she used to smuggle cigarettes by skiing over the high Tartar mountains in and

out and actually she didn't even smoke. She was one of the few women in 1930s Europe who didn't smoke. She just did it for kicks, just for the thrill of it. But it meant she knew the smuggling routes in and out of the mountains. So in February 1941, for instance, she's taking microfilm. Yeah, she served in three different theatres of the war. So this is the first one. She is serving as sort of working in intelligence and as a courier. She made

the first contact between Britain and the fledgling resistance in Poland which of course is the first occupied nation so Britain's desperate to find out what's going on in the country. So she skis in, gets rid of her skis and then she goes around the country, she makes contact with the resistance, she collects information from them but she also undertakes her own intelligence going around the country, seeing where troop movements are and so on and Then takes microfilm and other material first and coding information so we could establish radio contact with the Polish resistance skis back over the mountains to Budapest where she's based and hands it over to both Polish and

British resistance contact Can we just go back a bit because she's arrived in London in 1939, the back end of 1939 says you need to take me on and they eventually say yes okay fine. Yep. Then what? I mean she's got to have training. No well she was she's trained later on she's trained in 41. She's volunteered to MI6, SAS. That's right. So she's been taken on by SAS. So they do give her a false identity she's sent to Budapest and she's meant to be a French journalist. I mean among her language skills she's completely fluent in French and that's not unusual. Hungary hasn't

fallen yet. There's lots of international journalists based there seeing what's going on in Eastern Europe. So she's sent out there and from there she independently goes across the mountains. So she does make contact with the fledgling Polish resistance. The first time she skied in is actually with a pre-war Olympic Polish skiing champion, which is quite handy. And then when she comes back she makes contact with the man, Andrzej Kowerski, who becomes one of her main partners in the war, who's a one-legged veteran, and he's got a prosthetic one wooden leg, which is quite useful actually because he whittled a hole

in it and would hide information Stuff in his leg. Yeah We just touched on that moment ago that soe the creation of soe and she predates this but This is really the sort of significant thing that happens in British efforts to famously set europe ablaze. Yeah. I mean we're doing a podcast about Secret agents about soe we have to say, set Europe ablaze, or we'll be run out of town, won't we? We have to, you have to do it.

It's the famous church of this. Get through that bit. Yeah, and this is really, really important, isn't it? Because when we've talked about SIS here, but here's an actually separate organization being set up quite deliberately. Partly under the wing of SIS, even though there was huge problems between them.

Well, yes, I mean, it's sort of Venn diagram, sort of phasing in and out of one another as the war runs and is SOE under SIS's purview? It wasn't but it was partly from SIS, partly from Section D, D for Destruction, which is you know Big Bang Sabotage, which is partly why SIS of course, which is Silent Intelligence didn't get on with them. And if you want to hear those episodes search, we have ways of making you talk wherever you get your podcasts.