The Rest Is Classified - 17. ⁠Crossing the Iron Curtain: Revenge in Russia (Ep 4)

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Will Tolkachev fall at the final hurdle and land in the hands of the KGB? How do the CIA go about protecting their assets in the field? And, does it really take a spy to catch a spy? As we reach the final instalment of the story of Adolf Tolkachev, the plot reaches its dramatic crescendo. Tolkachev has now been working for the CIA for over half a decade and the pressure is clearly taking its toll on both him and the US agents around him. As the two Cold War powers face off on the outskirts of Moscow, which behemoth will come out on top? Listen as David and Gordon conclude their series on the unbelievable story of the Billion Dollar 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 is a Reese's Peanut Butter Cups sound experiment. We're looking to find the perfect way to hear Reese's so you'll buy more of them. Here we go. Reese's. Reese's. Reese's. Reese's. Reese's. Hey, get out of here, you little stinker! Reese's. Reese's.

Reese's. Peanut Butter Cups. That breathy one sounded very creepy, am I right? Tolkachev would take the documents home and photograph them. When the case officer commented that this was dangerous, Tolkachev laughed and said, everything is dangerous. In a written note, Tolkachev explained further his unwillingness to accept an exfiltration plan. He wrote that he and his wife had some acquaintances who'd left the Soviet Union and eventually ended up in the United States. The woman in this family had subsequently written to Tolkachev's wife about how much she missed her homeland.

Tolkachev said that his wife had commented that she could never leave Moscow, let alone the Soviet Union, because she would suffer too much nostalgia. Tolkachev said that given his situation, I cannot think about exfiltration since I would never leave my family. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And what you heard there comes from an official CIA study into the Tolkachev case, which was published in 2003. And we've been looking at this really extraordinary story about Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer,

but who had access to incredibly important secrets from the Soviet Union about radar, which were valued so highly that he was known as the billion-dollar spy because of the sheer significance of those details that he was passing to the CIA from the late 70s through into the early 80s. We've heard how he was a driven man. He was relentless, how he demanded suicide pills, but also Led Zeppelin records, amongst other things, to keep him going, how he was being met on the streets of Moscow by CIA officers after taking hours of routes to make sure they were free of surveillance. And then we've come to this point in the early 80s where the pressure is starting to show on Tolkachev

and the sense that this can't go on much longer, I think is growing, isn't it? Well, and I think there's pressure, of course, from the KGB on the streets of Moscow. And there are also just, I think, time and stress are kind of taking a toll on Adolf Tokachev. It's 1983 now, Gordon. And Tokachev, I think he's getting older, right? A little bit.

He's getting more tired. He used to be able to go to the lennon library in the evenings kind of right and continuous work is not doing that anymore doesn't have the energy for it he's had a few kind of flare ups of high blood pressure just see for help getting medicine and he is. Taking more and more risks to produce for CIA. And he has been taking documents, of course, out of the Institute for a long time, but he started to kind of be a bit more brazen about it, right, including he's actually pulled a ruse in which he told colleagues that a supervisor had a document he'd checked out,

but in fact, Tolkachev had taken the thing home to photograph it. And here you can kind of see this push and pull, this tension in the case, which to some degree is always present. But I think with time has become more and more acute for the CIA, which is the CIA desperately wants all of this information from Adolf Tolkachev, all of these photograph documents. They are so valuable to the Pentagon, to the American Defense Establishment. And so the CIA, the requirements that they're passing him in this period, the questions they're asking him, they want information on aircraft, for example, that don't fall

under his Institute's purview. And at the same time, the institute's security procedures have tightened. And yet they also want Tokachev to be careful to manage risk. And so you kind of have this feeling, I think, in this period and kind of the early 80s, where a lot of the mechanics of the case around money and compensation, you know, the actual tradecraft and the Como plan, how do we meet all that stuff has kind of been worked out. And yet you have the shadow over it, which is that at the end of the day, he is taking a massive, massive risk in every document that he photographs for the CIA. And the CIA, of course, you know, is also the wrestling with, well, with these new security

procedures at the Institute, we need to give him some other cameras. He gets these kind of tropal cameras. We talked about those in the first episode of the series. It's a smaller camera. You could actually use it potentially at the Institute to start to take photographs in the office, which he had not been doing. And he doesn't really have any privacy at the Institute either. He's got a desk, a shared space with their employees.

And so, you know, that's not going to help his blood institute either. He's got a desk, a shared space with their employees. That's not going to help his blood pressure either. He's been doing this for what? By 83, I mean, he first tried to contact them in what, 77. It's been about five years. I remember someone saying to me, no agent can keep going for more than 10 maybe, but under the situation he's going at, five like that is a lot. Even if you've got the best plan and you've got the most confidence in your handlers, you just think that the psychological strain on this must be extraordinary. And you know, you must end up at some point becoming somewhat paranoid, but he gets more nervous around this time, doesn't he gets more scared about what could be happening. So, in April 1983, Tolkachev's boss at the Institute receives a phone call from the security office which is known as the regime. And he is instructed to compile a list of people with access to something called Recognition

System RLS-19, which is a piece of tech that Tolkachev had passed sort of the information and schematics on to the CIA just a month earlier in March. That's a disaster, isn't it? This is terrifying. Because you know that they think something has happened to these schematics and Tolkachev knows he's passed it. So he must at that point think they're onto him. He absolutely does.

And in fact, the next day after he figures this out, the next morning, April 27th, he says, I'm sick, I'm not going to be at work. He gathers all of his spy gear, which he had stashed and kind of that crawl space above his kitchen. So cameras, all of the money, Gordon, and he goes to his dacha outside Moscow, burns everything in the stove, except for the meeting schedule with CIA and the L pill. Then he goes home, copies the meeting schedule, kind of using codes into a magazine, and then he burns the meeting schedule. Then on the 28th of April,

Tokhachev takes the L pill and goes back into work at the Institute. He figures that if he's gonna be arrested, it's gonna happen in his boss's office. So he's sitting at his desk for most of that morning working. Again, he's in kind of a communal space. There's people around. When he gets summoned into his boss's office, he slips the cyanide capsule under his tongue

and goes in and holds the meeting with his boss with the suicide pill in his mouth. Absolutely astounding. I mean, that is astounding. The meeting with his boss with the suicide pill in his mouth. Absolutely astounding. I mean, that is astounding. I mean, I think I'd be terrified. I just bite wrongly. I'd be by mistake and suddenly you're dead. I mean, just to have it there in your mouth and to know that it's just one bite and you're dead, but you've got to be able to do that if they're going to

arrest you, as we know from the way the KGB operate, they'll get their arms around you, you know, the heavies will come straight in one bite and you're dead. But you've got to be able to do that. If they're going to arrest you, as we know from the way the KGB operate, they'll get their arms around you. You know, the heavies will come straight in the room and you wouldn't have time, would you, to get it from your pocket or from wherever you've hidden it. So you've got to have it in your mouth ready, just in case. And I'll admit, when I was doing the research for this episode, you know,

as a former management consultant, there were definitely meetings I had where I wished I had where I wished I had had one of these. So I felt some measure of envy for Adolf Tokachev having an out in a meeting with his boss. We all had bosses like this, you know. Yeah. I don't know how many people have done that though. I think that's kind of extreme. It's a little like, it's a little extreme. It's on the extreme side. And this is what's wild, Gordon is that for the next several days,

he runs the same play. So he brings the L pill, the suicide pill to work every day. And every time he is summoned into his boss's office, he slips the capsule under his tongue. So he decides from there on out that basically whenever he's meeting CIA or he's carrying documents out of work, he is going to have the L-pill on him. And what's going on here is that there is a broad KGB investigation underway.

However, it doesn't seem over time, kind of figures out that it's not targeted explicitly at him. So, you know, there's more kind of spot checks by the KGB on who has documents and why. There's, I think, more pressure, but it's not a direct pressure on him. They're not looking for him, right? There's kind of a general increase in the level of security. And what happens is that between April and November of 1983,

Tolkachev starts to miss meetings with CIA. He misses five meetings, which is rare for the case. And it's a combination of surveillance on the deep cover officers who are meeting with him from the station and Tolkachev's wife inadvertently opening a small window on the outside of their apartment called the Fortochka, which was the signal that he wanted to meet.

So his wife was opening this thing just to bring air into the apartment. And then also his wife and son are answering the phone when the CIA calls. And so you have this really bad mix here, if you're Tolkachev and if you're CIA of no production, missed meetings, mistakes, and the terrifying reality that he feels that his life is under threat and that he needs to have the suicide pill in his mouth whenever he's doing anything of importance in the case. And the CIA don't know about the investigation at this point because they've not met him.

Because they've not been able to have these meetings. They've missed all the meetings. So they don't even know that he's under that kind of intense pressure with that pill in his mouth. It continues basically until spring of 1984. Finally Langley gets through, there's meetings and the case officers, the station headquarters are of course absolutely terrified by what's happened to him. But again, you see here this kind of tension,

right in the case of, well, they don't want him to stop producing stuff, right? So Tolgachev passes more film from the tropal cameras, pages of notes. And what he's been doing in this period, is it's much harder for him to take documents out of the Institute and photograph them on his lunch break. And so what he's been doing is taking documents into a stall in the men's room, putting them on kind of a shelf, which has a little bit of light and standing while photographing them under the light of a small window.

Right. And so Togachev says he wants another Pentax camera, which was his favorite method of photographing documents and he had burned his old one out of the Dacha when he thought the net was closing around him. Now with the Titan security at the Institute, the CIA does not want to give him the Pentax camera. It's much bigger than the tropal one. And I love talking about a good kryptonym Gordon. And in this period, Tolkachev's kryptonym changes, the CIA sometimes cycle them through from sphere to vanquish and the digraph becomes GT, not CK. So GT confirms it as a Soviet case and he is GT vanquish.

It's a good name, isn't it? Inside the CIA cable traffic. A good name. Better than CK sphere, I prefer GT vanquish. Better than CK sphere. Yeah, it does sound like a car. Yes. A producer, Callum, is saying.

I think that's right. Maybe he drives a GT, a GT, a GT, a GT vanquish around the streets of Moscow. So we get to 1985, which is an absolutely crucial year in this case. There's more meetings, kind of the business of the cases humming even with the risk. And I will mention here, Gordon, I think it's a fascinating anecdote in this case is that of all the meetings, the CIA is going to hold with Adolf Tokachev, they all take place within just a few miles of KGB headquarters at the Bianca like so all of this is happening, basically within

sight of the KGB must be kind of satisfying. It is again, you know, it goes to that in the last episode, we talked about this sort of high that CIA officers get from, you know, conducting these meetings without surveillance and doing this all under the nose of the KGB. I think for Tolkachev, it's probably very, very similar dynamic of almost feeling Godlike, like he is destroying the system from within and they have no idea that he's doing it. Now, Tolgachev is going to pass more Soviet military aviation plans for the 1990s. Right? He's got another personal wishlist, which is he wants a rear defroster for his car. He wants a certain kind of French medicine. He asked for more albums and books on architecture for his son. Now his son is interestingly, he's gotten married, but Tolgachev doesn't tell the CIA about this.

And at this point in 1985, his escrow balance is up to about one point nine million dollars. Again, he can kind of draw on that when he wants to. But as we said throughout the series, the money is a way for him to feel respected and valued. He's not really keen to spend it. And in March, the CIA is going to put up a signal for a quick meeting, they want to pass him new light meters to use for the

photography because some of the photos from the January haul didn't turn out tolkochev does not respond to the signal. The next week, the Moscow station sees a ready signal from tolkochev, which is again, that small window, the Fortochka is open. But it's different from the Fortochka is open, but it's different from the Fortochka that's typically used for the signal. Tolkachev doesn't show for the meeting. There's an alternative meeting date for the end of March that had been worked out in the

Como plan. That day comes and goes, no sign of Tolkachev. Then on Wednesday, the 5th of June of June 1985 is the next plan meeting. The for tochka this time it's the right one is open. But the case officer trying to go have the meeting has to abort because he's under surveillance. And then the weekend of the eighth and ninth of June, Tokachev and his wife go out to the dacha for a nice summer weekend in the country. And Tolkochev at that point,

his next scheduled meeting with CIA is the 13th of June. Now to get ready for this, and the CIA is of course trying to lull the KGB and thinking nothing is up. The Moscow chief of station has left Moscow to travel in the caucuses and applied kind of in advance for permission to travel, provided his itinerary and the CIA had been kind of trying to talk in the caucuses and applied kind of in advance for permission to travel, provided his itinerary in the sea, I had been kind of trying to talk to the a lot of the officers

have been trying to talk to the walls and their apartments, kind of hint to the KGB that June's going to be pretty slow operationally, right? We're up to nothing. The station in preparation for this, they pack an operational note, more cameras, pages of original material that Tokachev and again, it gives you a sense of the risk taking in this period. He actually given the CIA original kind of documents that the CIA is now returning. He wants in this package, there's 20 French drawing pens, two architecture books for his son, eight boxes of dental medicine. Tokachev's teeth had been bothering.

I mean, I find this fascinating. Eight boxes of dental medicine, eight bottles of fluoride, eight tubes of toothpaste. I mean, that's the list of stuff that they're going to be handing over amongst other things. And you just go, it's so kind of interesting, isn't it? As an insight as to what someone really wants and what they really care about, what you could get from the CIA and it's toothpaste and fluoride. I mean, it's such an ordinary thing, but I guess, you know, if you're worried about your teeth and they're hurting and you can't get it on the streets of Moscow, then that's what you want. Anyway, it's just, it's just a kind of real insight into the kind of the man somehow.

In the same vein, insight into the man, a book containing 250 pages of newspaper and magazine articles from the West, you know, so stuff he's not readily able to read in Moscow. The CIA will give him 100,000 rubles, which were toward interest on his escrow account. And the bags are so heavy that the case officer is worried that they're actually going to break. Now the Fortochka is open at the right hour. So the signal is that the meeting is on and there is a deep cover case officer named Paul Stonebaugh, who is going to set out with all this material in two

bags. Now Stonebaugh is kind of the new handling officer at this point in 1985 for Adolf Tolpachev. He's a former FBI man. He's a recovering Feeb Gordon, who's found the lights and joined the central intelligence agency. He's in his thirties. And what has come out since is that the KGB officers who are watching him gave him the code name, Narcisse, butchering the Russian, which essentially means the handsome one.

So he's a, a very handsome young man who's gotten out of the clutches of the FBI and joined the CIA. And he is now headed out on a surveillance detection route to meet Adolf Tokhachev. I'm sure the people who did surveillance on you in the past also had a similar nickname for you, David. I'm sure. I'm still waiting for the Syrian intelligence documents to come out to figure out what my nickname was. Yeah, that's what you're hoping anyway. So, Stonebaugh out on his SDR, his surveillance detection, he's driven on the first leg by his wife and then he proceeds on foot to the spot where he's going to meet Tokachev. It's got a

code name Trubka Pipe and the meeting is set for the spot with two payphones. Stoneball is kind of walking around. Nothing looks unusual, except there's a red haired woman speaking loudly on one of the payphones. And we should say, I think there's an exceptional write up of this meeting in a book called The Main Enemy written by Milt Bearden and James Risen. Milt Bearden was a former chief, I believe, of the Soviet division at CIA. That scene of the redhead woman speaking loudly on the payphone, you can imagine in the movie,

that's the moment where the camera kind of zooms in and the music kind of comes up and you're going like, is everything okay here or is something going wrong? That is exactly what Paul Stonebaball is trying to figure out. So he sits alone on a bench in a trash-strewn courtyard. There's kind of the overpowering smell of dog feces around. Everything is kind of identical to the casing report the station had prepared. Right. So someone had gone out there days or weeks prior and kind of said, here's what

this place feels like, looks like. Everything looks normal. And he's kind of got a baseline for the environment he's walking into. Now there is one unusual thing here, which is that there is a large trailer parked on the street. It's got a hitch propped up on cinder blocks. Stoneball looks at that and thinks it's strange, but he goes ahead with the meeting anyway. Now he's sitting there,

he's sipping water from a vodka bottle. So he looks like a normal Soviet citizen sort of just drinking vodka on a bench, whiling the day away. And he sees what he thinks is Tolkachev's car parked a few hundred meters away. Now, at that point, Stonebaugh begins to walk past the phone booth.

The redheaded woman pays him no attention. She's on her call. He turns toward the meeting point a few yards away, and then the world sort of blows up around Paul Stonebaugh. Five plainclothes officers of the KGB jump from the cover of kind of trees and brush nearby. Two of them grab his arms from behind. The other

two snatch the bags from his hands. Fifth man forces his head down as the other guys hold his arms kind of up behind his back in what's known as the chicken wing, which is a very typical way that the KGB would seize someone. It is exceptionally painful. Stoneball actually almost passes out from the pain. The tailgate of that park trailer slams down. The guys that are hiding inside come running out, all these KGB guys. Stoneball is photographed. The whole area is photographed. Stoneball is stuffed into a van. His arms are sort of pinned back over the back of a seat for the ride into KGB headquarters. Again, Stoneball almost passes out.

And when he's being questioned inside the Lubyanka KGB headquarters, all the materials are, you know, from his pack for Tolkachev are all spread out on the table, the KGB kind of knew the time and date of the meeting and Stonbaugh is in, in their grip. Now, interestingly enough, there'd also been a sort of double, a Tokachev lookalike, carrying a book with a white cover. That was the recognition signal was that Tokachev would have that book. The KGB had put that body double at the site where they'd arrested Stonebaugh. And the idea there being to make the CIA think that they nabbed Tolkachev from like a trade craft slip up, something

like that, there'd been a mistake on the streets. And they paraded this body double away, but Stoneball had been, you know, sort of, of course, taken violently, and didn't notice he never sees the double. And at this point, the CIA knows that Tolkachev is done, they have been made knows that Tolkachev is done. They have been made and Tolkachev is in the grip of the KGB. But the CIA have absolutely no idea what's happened. So with that, with Tolkachev clearly blowed with Paul Stonebar in the hands of the KGB.

Let's take a break. And afterwards, when we come back, we'll find out what happened to Adolf Togachev. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN. Now, Gordon, what do you find most useful about Nord? David, one incredibly useful feature I find is the ad blocking software. That stops you being targeted, we all know about that, by intrusive ads whenever

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We'd left the story of Adolf Tolkachev with the case officer, Paul Stombaar, who'd been out to meet him, captured by the KGB and taken to the Libyanca. And it being clear, David, that it was game over for Tolkachev. After many years of providing valuable intelligence, the KGB were clearly onto him. Well, and the CIA has absolutely no idea why. In the weeks and months afterward, the agency is desperately trying to answer that question. You know, so they look at how all of Tolkachev's reporting had been handled to see if maybe there had been a

leak somewhere, but the group that's getting it is extremely small. And the CIA starts to wonder, well, maybe he was rolled up in this security investigation that had begun at the Institute where he worked in 1983. Had that finally gotten to him, there was this very embarrassing bit that in 1984, three pages of the master copy of a top secret Tolkachev document were lost when they were sent to CIA's printing and photography shop and never found.

So the CIA is wondering, you know, could someone have found those and sold them to Moscow and then Moscow sort of traced them back to Tolkachev and the Institute. You know, there are other things like was his money spotted? Did he buy something out of character? And then that led the KGB to them. And the CIA has no idea. But what it does know is that because the KGB knew precise time and place of that June meeting, that the KGB had discovered the materials given to Tolkachev earlier that year that had included meeting sites, operational notes, and the schedule for when they would meet. So the KGB must have had access to that and Tolkachev, of course, is gone. Now, it is

going to come out that it wasn't any of those things that did him in it was not the security procedures. It was not his wife discovering money. It was not his spending habits. It was not the discovery of the Led Zeppelin albums that the CIA had given him. He was given up by a former CIA case officer named Edward Lee Howard, who'd actually been in the pipeline from Moscow and had been fired from the agency in these disgraceful circumstances. There's probably a whole separate pod we could do, Gordon, on Edward Lee Howard. And it turns out it's the very last Moscow rule that was illustrative to Tolkachev's

demise, and that is betrayal may come from within. And it was that simple. You have this sort of aggrieved agency officer who sells out Tolkachev. Edward Lee Howard may not have known Tolkachev's name, but he knew enough about Tolkachev. Edward Lee Howard may not have known Tolkachev's name, but he knew enough about Tolkachev to identify the case. And so Howard sells this information to the KGB for money. And eventually Howard's gonna flee the US and become the only CIA officer ever to defect to Moscow.

And he'll die there in 2002. I'm sure we'll look at Edward Lee Howard's story in detail at a later point, but it first of all shows that actually the trade craft in some ways had been good on the streets of Moscow because they hadn't spotted him through following one of those embassy officers or through Tolkachev's own mistake and taken a spy or a traitor effectively within the CIA to find Tolkachev, which in some ways is a tribute to all the kind of work and the tradecraft, but it's also, I

mean, it's a human tragedy for Tolkachev, but it's pretty bad for the CIA, isn't it? Is that you go to all that effort, investing in incredibly long surveillance routes and trying to protect your agent, and then he's blown because one of your own people betrays him. That's pretty bad, isn't it? And I mean, I don't know how Tolkachev would feel about that and how he'd feel about it, but to me, it seems like a real tragedy. Well, in the end, the Soviets found someone inside CIA who was willing to do the same

thing that Tolkachev had done. I think it illuminates this old adage, which is, you know, it takes a spy to catch a spy. It is very hard when you're running the trade graph appropriately, like CIA was with Tolkachev for years. And when you have an agent like Tolkachev, who is, you know, willing to take risk, but mentally in the game, very precise, ideologically committed, very hard to find them, right?

Very hard to find them. ideologically committed, very hard to find them, right? Very hard to find them. And it took a betrayal inside, you know, CIA to bring it all to an end. And so here is, you know, what happened to Tokachev because we had last seen him on his way to his dacha with his wife on this fateful weekend of the eighth and ninth of June, 1985.

And on their way home, Tolkachev and his wife are stopped by what looks like a police roadblock. And it is actually the KGB's seventh chief directorate, which is aided by a commando unit. And the details for this we have again from this wonderful story inside, wonderful and tragic story inside the book written by Milt milk bird and james risen called the main enemy and talk to have is asked by these kgb officers step out of the car. He's grabbed immediately jumped goes limp they pin his arms to his sides and force a thick rope.

Between his teeth and that is to prevent him from biting down. Between his teeth and that is to prevent him from biting down in case he's got that l pill in his mouth and remember that agent we had talked about in the past episode who had killed himself by biting into a pen the cage is intimately aware of this to their desperate to prevent this so they've got that thick rope in tolka chips mouth so we can't get the L-pill in there. They strip off his jacket and shirt in case he's got a suicide pill on his collar. They throw him into a windowless bus where he's stripped and cavity searched. And then they put him in a blue KGB running suit and they begin to interrogate him. He confesses immediately. He's taken to prison, taken to the Fortevo, which is a prison in Moscow, dates back to the days of Catherine, but it's being used by the Soviets as kind of the place where they hold political prisoners. And he's going to be sentenced to death for espionage by a three member military tribunal.

Before his death, he gets 15 minutes with his son Oleg, where Tokachev says he's sorry for what he's done. And Oleg, his son says, no, no, no, no no don't don't say that don't say you're sorry so the fort of which is where he. Most likely means is and is sort of a dark place it had been stallings premier shooting prison back in the days of the terror and in september of nineteen eighty six adult tolka chef gets let down one of these. of 1986, Adolf Tokachev gets led down one of these eerie kind of flat black corridors out of his cell. He's probably still in that blue prison running suit. The laces would have been taken off all his shoes.

You can't have any lengths of rope or sort of lace of any kind because they don't want you to strangle yourself. And then he's led by the guards. They have the guards there have these little wooden kind of almost like crickets to click, click, click to communicate with each other because prisoners inside Le Forte Vaux won't be permitted to hear other people's voices. They don't wanna hear the voices of the guards,

the voices of other prisoners. And very weirdly at Le Forte Vaux, they have these boxes, like almost like coffins, I guess, that are set against the walls, where as you're moving a prisoner, you could put them in one of those boxes if another set of guards approach with another prisoner, so the two won't see each other, you know, inside the prison. So they might have put Tokachev in one of those boxes or another prisoner might have

carried that burden that day. So Tokachev gets led into a room and, you know, again, these rooms, we don't exactly know how he met his end, but it is very likely, given the way that the KGB executed political prisoners in this era, that he was made to kneel, put up against a wall and shot in the back of the neck for treason. What do you think is going through his head? I was thinking as he's shot, do you think he regrets having done it? My sense is with him, if this had been someone who'd been doing it for the money, then that

moment you would surely think, what have I done? But this was someone who wanted to damage the Soviet Union. And so perhaps, would he at least felt he'd done that? I don't know. Or would he think, why did I do this? I don't know. It's interesting to try and work it out. And it goes to his motivation and his intensity.

But that feeling of when he's saying sorry to his son, who obviously didn't know what had happened, I mean, it's very powerful. And it does lead you to kind of wonder how he felt about it at that moment about his decision. Well, I think he's not apologizing to his son for the choices that he made. That's my sense, just my sense of the man. He's apologizing for what's happened, but he's not apologizing for what he's done. I think he was committed to the destruction of this system. And as we saw from the conversation around the suicide pill was very willing to die in service of destroying the Soviet Union or playing whatever role he could in its demise. And so I think he probably,

I mean, of course, there's all the, I'm sure human emotions of being terrified, as you're, you know, I mean, again, these these rooms at La Fortevo, they would have been used by Stalin's executioners during the 30s, to kill dozens or hundreds of people in a single night. So, you know, they've got these kind of like, scuppers cut deep into seams along the walls to facilitate cleanup with these like pressure hoses, because it would get so bloody and messy in these rooms. It's an inhumane, terrifying, brutal place to meet your end. And so I think he's, he's

terrified. But I think he's got to feel Tokajev has got to feel like he has succeeded in some way, like he has dealt an incredible blow to this system. I don't think he's doing this for any kind of notoriety at all. Of course, he's doing all of it in secret, but I think he's got to feel like he's part of a project bigger than himself and that he's meeting an end that he was prepared to meet all along, which is his own death in service of that goal. So let's look a little as we close at the impact, because he was an extraordinarily important spy, wasn't he?

He's not necessarily one of the most famous spies, but he is actually one of the most important ones that the CIA ran during the whole Cold War, I think it's fair to say, in terms of the kind of impact he had and the really valuable intelligence he passed. I think we said when we kicked off this series that turns out that a really small number of human sources tend to pay all the bills at CIA and other spy agencies and. I think the story does say something was true then and is still true today even in a very very digital world right that well placed human sources. Are exceptionally valuable and continue to be exceptionally valuable for collecting really all kinds of information but if you have a human in the right place, they can absolutely wreck a system from the inside out. Tolkachev alone compromised Soviet aviation platforms,

aircraft, like into the 90s. He did that alone. Without him, the agency would have had none of this and it would have been impossible, especially in that era where all this stuff was paper for the most part, it would have been impossible to compromise all of that any other way. You needed someone like Tolkachev to get that information. The value of that intelligence was that if there had been a war with the Soviet Union, it would have given the US a decisive advantage

when it came to the kind of the war in the air effectively. I mean, Tolkachev essentially compromised Soviet aviation and radar that was being developed throughout the 1980s. And one way, I think, to just see practically the impact that that had was, of course, the Soviet Union falls apart in the late 80s and early 90s.

But in the 1990s, the United States does fight a number of wars against former Soviet client states, right? So you take the first Gulf War as an example, the US shot down 39 enemy aircraft and didn't lose one. Sixteen of those kills involved missile shots fired out of visual range of the enemy. So again, the United States has superior technology and training, but that was also aided by Tolkachev, right? Who'd given the US basically every scrap of possible intelligence available on the radars, the avionics, and the technical specs of the planes that we were fighting against. And so

it's the same story in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. And David Hoffman in his book has this incredible stat, which is that the kill ratio for US aircraft, or essentially enemy aircraft to US aircraft, it was six to one in Korea. In the Vietnam War, it was two to one. And by the wars of the 1990s, it was 48 to zero. And that was because Adolf Tolkachev had provided the United States with basically the radar blueprints for every Soviet fighter that was manufactured in the 1980s, which is astounding.

I think that's what makes it so interesting as a case is that you can actually see the real world consequences, whether it's in US weapons design, US military plans, and even, as you said, in some of the small wars fought in the 90s, you can actually see the impact of the intelligence. It wasn't just something which was passed to policymakers and helped them understand it. It's fascinating. Going back to this issue about human sources and their value, I do wonder if in the modern world though, a modern-day spying operation, you could probably get a lot of that from a cyber espionage operation, couldn't you? Some of the plans and the designs, that's the kind of stuff you try and steal through cyberspace rather than needing a human agent. In those days, totally, it wasn't stuff that was online. You would need a person there to do what he did and photograph it. But

these days, perhaps slightly less so. I guess the way I think about it, Gordon, is that I think if you thought about the different ints of the intelligence game, human, you know, human intelligence, signals, intelligence, second, I would wager that in a world where more and more information is digital, that the market share for human has gone down. And for a whole bunch of reasons related to phones and cameras and sensors everywhere, it is harder and harder, you know, just maybe something we'll talk about too, which is that on the streets of Moscow today, the trade craft we've just talked

about has evolved, but it is still, especially with the right sources, exceptionally valuable. You think about what is the way to understand what Vladimir Putin is thinking. It's a simple example, and it's a type of political intelligence, not the sort of thing that Tolkachev is collecting, but you probably cannot replace the value of having somebody who's closely connected to Putin, who can then tell the CIA what he's saying, what he's thinking.

That is still really valuable. So I think it's a complicated picture, but the reality is that human intelligence like Adolf Tokachev provided is still exceptionally valuable today. Yeah, because the kind of information about what are Putin's intentions over Ukraine is probably held in a small group of conversations, not somewhere online, you can still

do cyberspace. You're right, though, I think, to raise that point that it's harder to run those kind of operations and do the human intelligence because some of the challenges of biometric surveillance cameras, a lot of surveillance cameras in Moscow, it must be harder. Though I did notice, there's an interesting story back in May 2013, so a good 30 years after Tolkachev, you've got an FSB officer pulling the baseball cap off a dejected American diplomat on TV and revealing that he's wearing a poor quality blonde wig. The FSB say that this third secretary at the US embassy had been caught carrying a map,

compass, cash, and a letter offering $100,000 upfront and a million dollars a year to spy for America. The recipient was told to go to a cafe and open up a Gmail account. Some of those kind of techniques that we saw in the Tolkachev operation are still clearly relevant. It's also in the last couple of years, we've had the CIA actually advertise on Telegram, which is used obviously extensively in Russia, in Russian, two Russian diplomats basically saying, if you feel like the direction of your country is wrong, we're open for business. Come and talk to us and get in touch with us, I think, with instructions on how to do

it on the dark web. I find that fascinating because it suggests that some of the elements of Tolkachev are still in place, aren't they? The idea that there might be people who are disillusioned with the direction of their country a bit like Tolkachev was. The CIA and MI6 have also said they're open for business for these people are still trying to find ways to contact them, even if there are some new ways over the dark web. So elements of that Tolkachev case have changed, but other elements are still very

much there and very much still in play today. Well, that's why I think these stories, even though they come from a different era, are so relevant. And it actually reminds me, Gordon, of the opening lines of, and I bet this wasn't on your bingo card for this series, it reminds me of the opening lines of the Disney Peter Pan movie, which is it had all happened before and it'll all happen again. And the reality is that the CIA desperately wants to know

what's going on in Moscow in sort of the clutches of Putin's system or the Soviet system. We desperately want to steal those secrets. And so you have this sort of never ending battle between the CIA and the Russian security services over those secrets, right? And it was true in Tolkev's day. And it's just as true today. Yeah, that some of the techniques may have changed, but the fundamental thing finding those Russians who are disillusioned with their leadership and the regime in which they are living under and who want to supply secrets, and

working out then how to meet them, how to recruit them, how to keep running them, and how to meet them, how to recruit them, how to keep running them, and how to avoid them getting caught. That is still at the heart of the spying game. And so I think that's a great place to end this remarkable story of Adolf Tolkachev. I think one of the great Cold War spy stories that there is. So thanks for listening. Goodbye. We'll see you next time.