Book Review (Non-Fiction) The Billion Dollar Spy

The Billion Dollar Spy

David E Hoffman

Icon Books 2015                                                      391 Pages  

      

19^th January 1991: The third day of the first Gulf War.

Four McDonnell-Douglas F-15C Eagle fighters of the US Air Force’s 58^th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 33^rd Tactical Fighter Wing, were refuelling in the skies over Saudi Arabia when the call to combat finally came. 

A Boeing E-3A Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning & Control System) aircraft on patrol vectored the quartet of Eagles on four “bogies” – unidentified aircraft - over Iraqi airspace.

As the Eagles closed in at slightly over the speed of sound, the bogies were positively identified as “bandits” -  enemy Iraqi fighters  - two MiG-29s “Fulcrums” and two MiG-25 “Foxbats”. The more agile Fulcrums veered away, but the Foxbats came barrelling straight towards Captain Rick Tollini and his wingman, Captain Larry Pitts. 

Suddenly, the Foxbats turned at “beam” or a 90-degree angle away from the oncoming American jet fighters and dived for the deck among low-lying fog. This was a classic Soviet tactic to take advantage of the “notch” where Doppler radar coverage was weakest against a backdrop of ground clutter. It might have worked, but Captain Pitts retained intermittent visual contact even as he initially lost radar lock. 

Undeterred by three missile misfires, Pitts finally downed a fleeing MiG-25, firing a fourth radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow missile that flew right up its tailpipe and blew up.  The Iraqi pilot bailed out, but his fate remained unknown as ejections at high speed and low altitude are often not survivable.  Captain Tollini’s F-15C shot down the other MiG-25. The MiG-29s were accounted for later that day by the other members of the same USAF flight.

The Americans had a secret inside edge in all such aerial encounters with Soviet-built fighters in the skies over Iraq, and later, Bosnia – a little-known aerospace electronics engineer called Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev, code-named CKSPHERE, who ranked among the most important agents ever to be run by CIA Moscow station on the KGB’s home turf.

The title of David E Hoffman’s book refers to the estimated value of the intelligence trove Adolf  "Adik" Tolkachev (1927-1986) delivered to his CIA handlers over an espionage career spanning 1979 to 1985: worth a conservative 2 billion US dollars!

As a Chief Designer of the Phazotron Avionics Design Bureau, Tolkachev was in a strategic position to deliver complete detailed information about such projects as the R-23, R-24, R-33, R-27, and R-60, S-300; aircraft intercept radars and weapons guidance systems used on the MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27 fighters; besides other avionics. Among the equipment compromised by Tolkachev was the passive phased array radar used by the MiG-31 Foxhound fighter, which the U.S. considered the most advanced Soviet airborne radar.

As a Russian studies specialist and author of two previously well-received non-fiction works on the Cold War and  post-Soviet oligarchs, Pulitzer prize-winning author Hoffman is well qualified to meticulously craft a real-life spy story that is far stranger than even the celebrated fiction of John Le Carre. The Billion Dollar Spy is the product of over 900 declassified CIA cables the author was allowed to access, besides exhaustive interviews – and it shows.

Dense with detail, the author reveals how CIA operations in the heart of the USSR were hamstrung initially during the 1950s by the all pervasive fear of a Stalinist state hardened by three decades of counter-revolutionary purges. Phones were tapped, mail opened and informers everywhere. The KGB was an ominous presence in every office and factory. This Orwellian nightmare was compounded by the unbridled paranoia of James Jesus Angleton, an influential head of CIA counter-intelligence who deeply distrusted any and all potential sources from within the USSR.

Hoffman shows, how overcoming institutional caution, a new generation of more adventurous CIA case officers pioneered more effective spy “tradecraft” in the back alleys of Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. Some of these hard-earned lessons were to be later applied in running Tolkachev in Moscow, a “walk-in” who finally made contact with CIA station chief Gardner Hathaway in 1978 after several unsuccessful tries. Perseverance paid off; the CIA assigned Russian-speaking John J Guilsher as CKSPHERE’s case officer on his fifth attempt.

What drove Adolf Tolkachev to betray a state that had elevated him to its aerospace elite? Deeply angered by the unjustified suffering of his wife Natasha Kuzmin’s family during the Stalinist purges  and inspired by the examples of dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tolkachev decided to seriously hurt the communist regime he held responsible. The defection of Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko in a MiG-25 Foxbat to Japan in 1976 provided the catalyst;  ordered by the state to redesign the MiG’s by-now compromised radar and electronics, Tolkachev resolved  to turn over the most closely held secrets of Soviet military research over to the “main adversary”, the United States.

Such was the magnitude of Tolkachev’s gift, that it still ensures unrivalled US military air superiority worldwide,  decades after the betrayal of CKSPHERE by CIA turncoats Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, and his subsequent arrest and execution in 1986. That is why the above painted portrait of Adolf Tolkachev photographing classified documents still finds pride of place in CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, to this very day.