The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

Tolkachev never told his wife or son about his espionage, to protect them if he was ever arrested. This sometimes led to communications glitches. His apartment was only five hundred meters or so down the Garden Ring Road from the U.S. embassy, and his signal that he was ready to meet with the agency was to open a fortochka, a small ventilating window common in Soviet apartments. A CIA officer would check his ninth-floor window on his way to work, or his wife could pass by on a shopping run. But at least once, after Tolkachev left the window open to signal for a meeting, his wife closed it before anyone from the CIA had a chance to check it; Tolkachev was left waiting at the meeting site alone.

Tolkachev did not ask for money in his initial messages to the CIA, and after he began to meet with Guilsher he made it clear that he was motivated by a deep hatred of the Soviet system. Still, he told Guilsher he wanted the CIA to pay him so he could be certain that the agency took him seriously and that the Americans valued his information. The CIA obliged, handing over hundreds of thousands of rubles bought on the black market in Germany and setting aside far more in a reserve account he could use if he ever defected.

Tolkachev was smart enough not to spend his cash lavishly. He bought a car for the first time in his life, but it was a simple Zhiguli, a Soviet-built Fiat. He also found a small dacha for his family. Still, he began to feel uncomfortable with the huge sums of money he was receiving from the CIA, money he couldn’t spend without drawing suspicion. Eventually he asked his handler to give some of his money to the families of jailed Soviet dissidents. The CIA never did meet that demand, but the request convinced the agency that he was driven by deeper motives than cash.

He did, however, make requests of a more personal nature. He asked for medicine and books for himself, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which was banned in the Soviet Union; the memoirs of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; novels of Russian masters like Turgenev and Pushkin; and, incongruously, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (The KGB would later have a field day when they discovered this; they would play on Tolkachev’s first name, Adolf, and smear him by alleging that he was a closet fascist.)

He also wanted to give a few small things to his family. He asked for supplies that were hard to come by in Moscow for his son’s studies in architecture, and Western rock and roll for the boy’s music collection, from Led Zeppelin to Uriah Heep and the Beatles. The CIA worried that he would have a hard time explaining how he’d come by new American records, so the agency’s technicians bought the records, rerecorded the music on cassettes, and packaged them so they looked like cheap knockoffs from Eastern Europe.

In the fall of 1980, David Rolph, a young Russian-speaking case officer, took over from Guilsher and became Tolkachev’s lifeline to the CIA for the next two years. Rolph was part of a new generation of highly educated case officers who would make their mark in the coming decade. Before joining the agency, he had been a country lawyer in southern Indiana, married with small children and increasingly fearful that his dreams of seeing the world were passing him by. An Army brat, Rolph had grown up on a series of military bases, but mostly at Fort Knox, Kentucky. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, where he studied Russian history, he enlisted in the Army one step ahead of the draft in the midst of the Vietnam War. The Army sent him to Russian-language training in Monterey, California, and before long, Rolph found himself in training for Army intelligence. A quick promotion to officer followed, and by 1971 he was serving as an Army intelligence officer in the Berlin Brigade. The end of the Vietnam War meant an early discharge, and Rolph returned to school, this time to Indiana University, for a master’s degree in Russian studies. He was hoping to become a college professor. But the academic job market in the mid-1970s was abysmal, so he switched to IU’s law school in search of a more marketable degree and paid his family’s bills by working as a flight instructor at Bloomington’s airport. After law school, he worked one year as an attorney at a small practice in Spencer, Indiana, but the work was simply too boring to keep his interest, and he sent off an application to the CIA.

When he took over the Tolkachev case, Rolph became the front man for what had become a veritable industry within the American intelligence establishment, one that was built upon Tolkachev and his secret documents. In the days leading up to a meeting with Tolkachev, Rolph could feel the anticipation and tension build across the cable traffic from headquarters. He knew how much was riding on each meeting; yet he also knew that he couldn’t let the pressure from Langley push him into taking unacceptable risks. He had little difficulty reminding himself that Tolkachev’s life mattered more than the secrets he might pass at the next meeting. Rolph stayed with his personal rule—if he ever felt he wasn’t absolutely free of surveillance, he would abort the meeting.

But Rolph never had to cancel a meeting, thanks to Moscow Station’s ingenious use of disguises and identity transfer techniques, which allowed him to break free of surveillance on a regular basis.

Before some of these meetings, Rolph and his wife would make an obvious show of visiting the apartment of the station’s deputy technical officer, a man the KGB knew did not conduct clandestine operations. In the apartment, Rolph would switch into a disguise that made him look like the tech officer, and then he would leave the compound